Phase billing tells the client's story, not the firm's
Most Ontario practices bill the way OAA Document 600 frames the work: a fee divided across schematic design, design development, construction documents and contract administration, invoiced at milestones or as monthly percentages of each phase. That is the right way to bill a client and a poor way to measure a firm, because fee is earned continuously as the drawings advance while invoices land in lumps. Books that recognize revenue only when an invoice goes out show a loss during a heads-down CD month and a windfall the month the milestone finally bills.
The fee basis adds its own wrinkles. A percentage-of-construction-cost fee moves every time the construction budget is re-estimated, so the books need the current estimate, not the one from the proposal. Hourly-to-a-cap arrangements need burned hours tracked against the cap before the cap quietly arrives. Our End-to-End Accounting service closes every month on fee earned — percent complete on each phase times the phase fee — reconciled to what was actually invoiced.
The two accounts most studio books are missing
When the team runs ahead of the billing schedule, the gap is unbilled work in progress: earned fee not yet invoiced. When a signing retainer or an up-front milestone runs ahead of the drawings, the gap is deferred revenue: cash held for work still owed. We post both every month, so the income statement stays honest and year-end starts half done. Unbilled work is also a tax question for architects, and our tax pages cover that side.
What the month-end review watches, phase by phase:
| Phase | What clean books catch |
|---|---|
| Schematic design | The retainer applied against earned fee, not booked as income the day it arrives |
| Design development | Client-driven revisions burning hours against a fee that has not changed |
| Construction documents | The heaviest labour burn of the project, where overruns surface first |
| Contract administration | A long tail of small monthly invoices across construction, the easiest fee to under-bill |
Subconsultants and disbursements, coded the day they arrive
Structural, mechanical and electrical fees usually flow through the architect as prime consultant. Each engineering invoice gets coded to its project and phase on arrival, so the flow-through goes out on the next client bill instead of being discovered at year-end, and the 13% HST on it is recovered in the same period it was paid. Printing, renderings, models and travel get the same treatment; a disbursement that never reaches a client invoice is margin given away quietly.
One habit that pays off at filing time: permit and planning-application fees paid to a municipality as the client's agent are tracked in their own account, because they are re-billed without HST while ordinary disbursements are not. Keeping that split live all year means the HST return needs no archaeology.
Payroll for a studio, in the same engagement
Salaries are an architecture firm's largest cost, and a studio payroll has texture: licensed architects, intern architects logging experience hours, technologists, co-op students. Because bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing sit under one roof, labour posts to projects at loaded rates, T4s reconcile to the ledger without a February scramble, and anyone paid as a contract technologist is flagged for T4A reporting from the first invoice.
The tooling stays deliberately boring. QuickBooks Online is the ledger, Dext captures subconsultant invoices and receipts, Plooto pays them on approval. If the studio plans work in Monograph or BQE CORE, we reconcile the ledger to it monthly rather than letting two systems tell two different stories.
A month-end a principal can read in ten minutes
Each month you get fee earned versus billed by project, labour cost against each phase, receivables aged with names attached, and an HST return built from reconciled numbers instead of estimates. That one page answers the operating questions: which project needs staff, which client needs a call, whether the next hire is affordable. It is also the base the planning work stands on, because clean phase balances make the year-end WIP number a lookup, not an argument. When principals want these numbers turned into pricing and staffing decisions, our Fractional CFO work builds on the same ledger.
We run this for studios across Mississauga and the GTA. The first month is usually a rebuild: reconstructing project-to-date fee and cost so the phase numbers start true, then keeping them true. Scope and fee land in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
