What usually breaks
Studios tend to discover a project is over on fee once it is already over. Hours are logged inconsistently, fee usage against contracted value gets checked when someone remembers, and resourcing for the next month is whatever the principals can hold in their heads.
- Fee burn is checked too late. Usage against contracted value gets reviewed when a project already feels wrong, not while it can still be corrected.
- Resourcing lives in the principals' memory. Which works until two projects need the same person in the same fortnight.
- Submittals, RFIs and change orders move through email. Where they are easy to lose and impossible to audit.
- Utilization is unmeasured. Nobody can say what proportion of studio time was billable last month without building a spreadsheet to find out.
What we build
For a studio the four modules are usually the project portfolio, fee tracking, resourcing, and approvals. Fee and time are deliberately in the same tool, because separating them is what causes the problem.
- Project portfolio. Every project with its phase, contracted fee, and fee consumed to date.
- Fee and time tracking. Hours logged against project and phase, so burn is current rather than reconstructed.
- Studio resourcing. Who is on what over the coming weeks, so over-allocation is caught before it happens.
- Approvals inbox. Submittals, RFIs, invoices and change orders in one queue with a status, instead of in email.
Timesheet or accounting sync is the usual pairing here, so billable hours reach the invoice without being retyped.
What changes
Fee position is visible while there is still fee left. Resourcing conflicts surface weeks out rather than the week they bite. Approvals stop being an email thread somebody has to remember to search for, and studio utilization becomes a number leadership can actually manage against.
A architecture build we shipped
A six-person studio running ten active projects across five sectors. Read the Meridian Rowe case study for the full picture of what we built and why.
Common questions
Can it replace Deltek or Monograph?
For a small studio, often yes, and for a larger one, often not. Those tools carry a lot of accounting depth. If you're using that depth, keep them. If you're paying for a practice management platform and still tracking fee burn in Excel because the platform doesn't fit how you work, that's exactly the gap a custom build closes.
Does it handle phases and fee stages?
Yes, and it should, because a fee tracked as one number is nearly useless to a studio. Work stages, the fee allocated to each, and consumption against each are the whole point of the fee module. Bring your standard appointment structure to the call.
Can consultants and sub-consultants be tracked too?
Consultant appointments and their fees can sit in the project record. Giving external consultants their own logins is a different thing, because that's multi-user roles and permissions, which sits outside the typical build and gets scoped separately.
Not sure it fits?
Every build starts with a free kickoff call, and it is a scoping conversation rather than a pitch. If what you need is bigger than one dashboard, or if your existing systems are closed in a way that makes this hard, we will tell you on that call instead of after you have committed. See how the process works, or browse the other builds.