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Your BOF

11/7/2022

Determining your Billing Overhead Factor [BOF] can be an eye-opening exercise.

I learned this technique from Paige Highfill, an architect, who was teaching other architects how computers can be used in architecture even before CAD came along. When I tried out the calculation, I was shocked to find that we were losing $15 per hour on every hour we billed! I suggest that you avoid that situation.

Budgeting For Expenses

10/31/2022

I have always found that one of the key parts of getting a grip on the firm's finances is to have a good idea where the money goes. You might not need all the line items in the budget template here, we didn't; but it is helpful to start with all the possibilities and narrow things down from there.

Planning For The New Year

10/24/2022

The Problem With Plans

I guess the calendar year is the accepted time frame for taking stock of achievements and planning for the new year.

Profit And The Crystal Ball

10/10/2022

The first time we had a profit, we didn't find out until March ...

The 6 Ways To Set Hourly Rates

7/4/2022

At one time or another I have used each of these methods. Those sometime painful experiences are the basis for my recommendation.

Profits and profitability for architects

6/23/2022

If work load is adequate but you aren’t making a profit, the cause is easy to find.

The Three Aspects

5/5/2022

In order to build a successful architectural firm you need to master
The 3 Aspects.

Ochre Benefits

4/10/2022

The Ochre Bookkeeping System For Small-Firm Architects
Benefits And Features

CODA For Architects

4/6/2022

There is a new tool that could be a game changer for your firm.
Read on to see what Coda can do for you.

Planner Update

4/4/2022

The Project Planning Worksheet has been a popular tool. Re-imagining the Planner as a Coda Doc has transformed it into an even more powerful tool.

A Bidding Process

4/1/2022

An overview of the architectural bidding process including checklists.

How Do You Calculate Fees?

10/4/2021

There are only three ways to calculate the fee for an architectural project.

List all the tasks that the project requires, and estimate the time that each task will take. The typical project has over 500 tasks.
Research the fees and profitability of similar past projects, and interpolate the fee for this project. Unfortunately projects are rarely very similar.
Use a fee schedule to look up the value of the project in question.

FeeCalqs uses method #3 - but improves on the typical use of this method.

Here's How FeeCalqs Works

Drywall Details

9/27/2021

Build your expertise in commercial construction

Verifying Architectural Fees

9/21/2021

Whether you have arrived at a fee by a wild guess or a fee schedule you want some kind of corroboration.

One option, if you keep good records, is to compare this project to a similar project. Was the fee adequate on that other one? Usually the two projects are dissimilar in some way.

Another way of checking the 'rightness' of an architectural fee is to evaluate its 'rightness' when viewed as a design budget.

This option involves doing an evaluation. It is fairly easy to 'spread out' the fee over the design phases to see how adequate the fee actually is.

Here's How...

FeeCalqs - It All Starts With Fee Tables

8/5/2021

When I published Feecalqs a while back, I failed to place the emphasis on the fact that Feecalqs is four linked electronic spreadsheets. This is important because the effort that it takes to arrive at a realistic fee for any project takes just a few minutes with a digital method of calculating fees. You already know the information that you need to enter, so it takes no time at all.

One of the four spreadsheet that you don't even have to look at is the Fee Tables. There are five tables representing the five Building Groups. These Building Groups arrange the different types of buildings into groups based on the difficulty of designing them. This Building Groups post shows the listing that I assembled from various sources.

Here's what the fee tables look like and how they work...

Architectural Fee For A Custom Scope Of Services

8/3/2021

I have written a fair bit about Architectural Fees in the past. I guess I remember what a mystery it was to me at one time. I have covered the basics of Fee Tables here and the complexity of the typical Hybrid Project here. The remaining factor in determining the appropriate fee is Scope of Services.

What are you required to do to complete the project?

If the answer is standard Basic Services, then the issue of Scope of Services is settled. Basic Services is the answer for a lot of smaller public projects.

Something different than Basic Services is more likely the case in private work. Private clients don't fit the cookie cutter of public projects. They need more here and less there. That makes determining the appropriate fee more complicated.

Here's the solution.

New Rendering

6/29/2021

Although only in early design, 3D views help everyone see what the project will be like.

What Happened To MyCorbu

6/25/2021

Building Acoustics For Architects

6/23/2021

We have all experienced rooms with poor acoustics, particularly unwanted sound transmission. To avoid poor acoustics you need to design a workable solution and you need to see that your solution is implemented.

Good Architectural Acoustics requires the use of just five simple concepts...

The 1 Reason To Plan Before You Design

5/4/2021

I got the opportunity to design some school buildings right out of college. They were fairly large projects taking six months to a year for the design phases. There was lots of time to recover from missteps. After a couple of these I got an admin building for a small school district. By comparison this was a three-bedroom house in scale. Before I had a handle on what the project would entail, I started focusing on the entrance and how I wanted that to work. After a day or two, the question came. "What the hell are you doing?" I explained about the importance (to me) of the entrance. "Do you even know if this is going to be 1-story or two? Does it fit the site?"