 If you do a good job of Construction Administration,
you, the architect, will lose money. Guaranteed.
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 MyCorbu just got closer to the vision of offering a real solution to the small firm’s need for architectural bookkeeping. All that’s missing is an invoicing solution. (That’s next.)
Architectural Bookkeeping has come to MyCorbu BOOKS, the renamed, paid version of the MyCorbu timekeeping app.  Small firms don’t need accounting.
Your accountant doesn’t agree with me. He’s wrong unless your firm has over 20 members. The problem with accounting is that it requires brain-surgery-precision for a task that doesn’t much matter. When you stop to think about the time, effort, and aggravation that accounting requires; and what benefit you receive in return; something is fundamentally wrong. Basically you can’t afford to do accounting until you are large enough and complex enough to afford a bookkeeping employee. I know this because my six-person firm used accounting for most of our existence and got almost no benefit from the tens of thousands of dollars per year that we spent on accounting. Why did we do it? Ignorance. I thought I had to. I mistook AIA publications as applying to me. They don't. They apply to much larger firms than I ever had. About 93% of architectural firms are smaller than 20 people. They can't afford accounting. They can only afford bookkeeping. So what is the difference?  For over 20 years I had the benefit of having Project Financial Status calculated for me by our (pricey) accounting software after each month was ‘posted’. You could choose from two methods. Method A was automatic but gave useless results. Method B required you to input an overhead factor to allocate overhead per hour of time charged to the project. This method gave consistent results and the results were accurate as long as your overhead factor was up to date.
You can see how to calculate an overhead factor here. MyCorbu provides the same Project Financial Status as a pricey accounting system. One difference is that MyCorbu does it daily rather than monthly.  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.
 Whenever the economy tanks, I get really interested in cash flow. It's a habit that I try to hang onto when things are going well, too, because you can run out of money any time. But there is something about impending doom that gets your attention. Most of the guidance you can find on cash flow is geared to 'small businesses', less than 5,000 employees! This isn't very helpful. In a nutshell cash flow is predicting your cash-basis profit or loss. It is the nature of predictions to be wrong almost all the time. So a cash flow projection isn't reality, but you want to get close enough that there aren't any devastating surprises. This simple spreadsheet below is my attempt to get a view of the income side of the cash flow projection. The idea is to quickly allocate your fee for a project over time so you can compare it to the other ingredient - an expense projection.  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...  I don’t know what it is about accounting. It is really boring. And yet I am repeatedly drawn to the challenge of finding a system that works for architects.
This past week I revisited two services that I hadn’t looked at for over five years - LessAccounting and FreeAgent. I have already put LessAccounting aside for the time being. You would probably need a better timekeeping system than LessAccounting’s app, LessTimeSpent. And other aspects just weren’t falling into place. FreeAgent on the other hand has me digging in.  My Interview With Business Of Architecture / Enoch SearsA guy who knew me from my Corbu adventure mentioned me to Enoch Sears. Enoch has a website called The Business Of Architecture. Part of what Enoch offers is a podcast that interviews people in the architecture industry. He invited me to be interviewed. I said, 'Yes'. And here we are.
The interview is broken into two parts below. 
During my career we saw a wide range of projects. They ranged from really small and simple to really big (for us) and complicated. On the small end of the spectrum was a two-car garage addition to the side of a house. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a new high school. I will show you how the five fee tables of a fee schedule can span that kind of range. Let's take a closer look at the five tables that make up the fee schedule.
 My firm had in-house payroll for 30 years. I thought it was great. Pay period ends. The next day everyone had their paychecks by 11 AM.
Sweet. It wasn't until the last recession had us on the ropes, and, simultaneously, our accounting software provider wanted $12,000 for their new program that replaced the old program that they had decided to abandon that we challenged what we were doing. 
click to download
The chicken or the egg
If you specialize in one project type, your past experiences give you a solid basis for determining fees. But what do you do until you have past experiences to draw on? When you don't have a comparable project to use for gauging the right fee, a fee schedule gives you a way to arrive at an appropriate fee for your project. Even where you have a similar project, the size or some other aspect of the new project might be significantly different.  During my career we used a true accounting package designed for architects. You would think that everything worked great. You would be wrong. When it came to checking on the status of a project's budget, you rarely got an answer in the time frame that you were expecting.
Why wasn't a Project Status readily available?
The point is that getting a timely project status was a lot of work to keep up with. I am happy to report that bookkeeping solutions don't require all of that. Here's all you do...  Architecture is not known, at least to those involved, as the most profitable of businesses. Salaries aren't commensurate with responsibility. We all need to work on this. Here's my first shot.
#1 ’PLANNED’ LOSES The number one way to lose money, or at least limit your profitability, is to inadvertently plan for that outcome. (See Architectural Economics.) Many firms ignore the facts of their own operation and use industry rules of thumb instead. Know your costs and ratios; and run your firm based on facts.  Over the past year I have spent a lot of time looking into how architects do bookkeeping. My focus was on small firms of less than 15 people. I have interviewed about 75 firms and received almost 1500 survey responses. For most of my career, my firm was seven people or smaller. For about 20 years we used Deltek Advantage and liked it. It is only in hindsight that I realized what gross overkill that software was. That is the problem that everyone in the small firm category has: Finding a bookkeeping solution that doesn't cost too much money and TIME. After a year I know that solution does not exist. I continue to look for programs that could be the solution - even if it means "tricking" them into being what is needed. Along the way I have learned a lot about what small firm architects use and how things could be better, even if perfection remains elusive. These six articles describe what I have discovered. 
Maybe paying your bills is supposed to be painful. If you subscribe to that way of thinking, then by all means soldier on. If you don’t subscribe, but are using a process that involves a printer, I have good news.
The Internet is here to help you. First, let’s recap the old school process. This isn’t exactly what you are doing (because I don’t know anyone at NSA), but it is what I/we did for 25 years. It looks like this.  Profit Planning From All Sides Profit planning wasn’t a concept I was familiar with. I distinctly remember our first profit and not knowing what to do with it. I didn't have a plan. I didn't even know I needed one. That’s probably one of the best problems to have. I don’t remember what I decided to do, but I know that was the start of many efforts to come to grips with profit planning in case the miracle happened again. I can’t claim to be an expert on the topic of ’Profit Planning’, but here are my thoughts. Profit is not a dirty word
Everyone loves what profits do. Profit provides bonuses, improvements of all types, and the ability to grow. Let me explain what I mean by profit. The simplest way to describe it is that profit is what you pay taxes on – actually it is what is left after you pay all your expenses. In the normal course of things, you won’t find out if you had a profit until March when your accountant finishes your tax return. Profit planning requires you to be more proactive than that. For instance you might want to pay a bonus before Christmas – the traditional bonus-giving time. We did. We could never get used to giving bonuses any other time than mid-December. So before Profit Planning took hold, we paid (modest) bonuses at Christmas based on feel and available cash. An ’informed’ decision would have been a ’different’ decision about the size of bonuses. Our third (or fourth) accountant offered to review our books in early December so we could be more accurate and better informed about profit planning. That’s actually a good idea, but we only took advantage of the offer (and paid the cost) when we were pretty sure there was profit that needed planning. If we thought we we going to have a loss, it wasn’t because we were trying to have a loss. Besides no amount of planning would turn things around in 30 days – we would have already done that if we could. So the first tactic for Profit Planning is predicting your profit for the year by getting your accountant to review your books and tell you where you stand. Depending on your bookkeeping system, this might be pretty easy. In any event you will be able to make a better decision about bonuses and other year-end issues. If you start this type of profit planning around Thanksgiving, there will be another month or so for which you will have to estimate your income and expenses. We always assumed that December would be a break-even (or worse) month because of time off around the holidays and clients getting distracted with the season’s festivities. I recommend that you take your accountant’s advice with a pinch of salt. There is a difference between accounting advice and business advice. You may have to filter your accountant’s advice by your feel for internal and external ramifications. There were plenty of recommendations I wasn’t willing to follow to save $200. You decide. You need to KNOW the numbers, but you may not want to LIVE by the numbers. We eventually had software that gave us a good feel for where our profit/loss stood. I never felt the need to get down to the decimal point with this type of projection – a few hundred dollars either way was good enough. So this is the second way to go if you have the in-house tool to make a decent year-end projection. I plan to include that functionality in MyCorbu eventually. The main reason to go through all this is to determine bonuses and other uses of profit. Our situation, which I think is similar for most firms, was that we created a tax liability if money remained in the firm past year-end. Get your accountant to explain how you will be impacted so you have a guide to go back to each year. Our goal was to use up all profit by year end so that there was very little tax due. An unfortunate consequence of using up all your profit is that you will very likely be short of cash for the first few months of the new year. We made every effort to avoid using our bank for a working capital loan. Often times I loaned my bonus back to the firm to avoid a bank loan. The key issue is that knowing the facts beforehand is much better than finding out the facts afterwards. Mark your calendar to start working on this in early November. Uses Of Profit So what is profit used for besides bonuses? This is the way that I think about it, and what we used profit for.
Profit Allocation So if you have decided on bonuses, a new plotter, and a marketing initiative, you have probably just decided on how to allocate your profit. In fact my experience is that trying to allocate profit by some formula never seems to work out. Instead, if you give some thought to what you would do with a profit of $xx,xxx, this always seems to ‘allocate’ the profit. It also gives you a target to shoot for. Consider turning the process around, and decide what you would like to do, and how much profit that will take. Put numbers on each item, add them up, and you have your profit target – or at least your first stab at a target. If you don’t go through this exercise, you don’t really have a way to determine what your hourly rates should be. If you aren’t charging enough to give bonuses, then you can’t give bonuses without going broke. (I described how to go about this in this post.) Profit gets factored into hourly rates, design budgets – make it conscious. Markup In Profit Planning To move beyond using an arbitrary percentage markup, plan how much profit you would like by budgeting amounts for your profit allocation. Here’s an example:  For over 20 years I had the benefit of having project profitability calculated for me by our (pricey) accounting software. You could choose from two methods. Method 1 was automatic (Yea!). Method 2 required periodic input (Boo!).
Method 1 was to let the software figure out overhead allocation each month. Completely automatic. Check the box and forget it. The downside was that the results often loaded up a project with an excessive overhead allocation. This might be due to a large annual expense falling due that month, say professional liability insurance. Method 1 was fully automatic – and useless. Method 2 was to input an overhead allocation factor. This factor was used to allocate overhead per hour of time charged to the project. This method gave consistent results and they were accurate as long as your overhead factor was realistic. We knew how to calculate a realistic overhead factor, and you can see how here.  You have probably heard it before, and it is true. You need to fill out, and submit, time sheets daily. Why? I suspect that you know, but I'll recap for you. 
There are probably thousands of ways to estimate design fees. My method has evolved over 30 years into this approach that I am sharing with you.
Estimating design fees is part science and part art (OK...it’s math and guessing). The approach that I use is dictated by the size/complexity of the project, who the competition is, and who the client is. Before we get into the nuts and bolts, let's dispense with 'competition' and 'client' considerations. These two issues affect what you do about the number that you have arrived at as 'the fee'.  PERCENT OF NON-BILLABLE TIME Are you spending too much time on accounting? One of the late realizations that I had after 20 years of using a powerful accounting program is that it was costing much more per year than it should. It wasn't the $1,000 per year subscription that cost too much; it was the time required to USE the accounting program. A true accounting program, like we were using, is very fussy. If it were a person, it would be considered “high maintenance”. In our case, the time spent on accounting was time that could have been spent on billable tasks. We could have easily afforded to farm out every accounting chore for what we were “spending” in lost opportunity. Here is how I look at time allocation for accounting now. 
My first survey of architectural accounting methods collected 400 responses. These responses form the basis for this update. That first survey is effectively closed. I started to notice that I was asking different questions when I interviewed someone. So I cloned the first survey and deleted the questions that weren’t helping to understand the methods being used. Then I added a few new questions. Survey 2 is two questions shorter, but offers more opportunities to comment. I plan to publish the results of Survey 2 when the number of participants are similar to the first survey. But here’s what I have learned so far. 
The first time we had a profit, we didn't find out until March when our accountant finished our tax return. We paid (modest) bonuses at Christmas based on feel and available cash on hand. An ’informed’ decision would have been a ’different’ decision.
Of course our accountant offered to review our books in early December so we could be more accurate and better informed. That's actually a good idea, but we only took advantage of the offer (and paid the cost) when we were pretty sure there was profit that needed planning. If we thought we we going to have a loss it wasn't because we were trying to have a loss, and no amount of planning would turn things around in 30 days - we would have already done what we could.  I distinctly remember our first profit and not knowing what to do with it. I didn't have a plan. I didn't even know I needed one. That’s probably one of the best problems to have. I don’t remember what I decided to do, but I know that was the start of many efforts to come up with a plan we could use in the future. I can’t claim to be an expert on the topic of ’profit’, but here are my thoughts.
What is profit used for? This is what we have done. |
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