"Time Tracking for Architecture, by RIBA Stage"

This post is for architects and architectural practices that bill in stages and are tired of pretending a flat project budget captures how a job actually runs. If your work moves from Concept through Developed Design and Technical Design and on to Handover, and each stage has its own fee and its own risks, this is written for you.

I am not an architect. I built owntime for consultants, and a handful of the people who switched early were small studios. They taught me the language, and I am going to use it here, but if I get a term wrong, that is on me, and I would rather be honest about that than fake expertise.

#The shape of an architectural job

Most jobs a consultant tracks look like this: a project, a budget, hours logged against it, an invoice at the end. Simple.

An architectural job does not look like that. It looks like a series of gates. Each RIBA stage is its own mini-project, with its own fee, its own scope, and its own point where the client decides whether to keep going. Stage 3 can eat Stage 4's fee if you are not watching. Site visits generate costs that are easy to forget on the invoice. Variations come in mid-stage and need to be priced from something more hopeful than a guess.

The problem with treating this as one project with one budget is that you cannot see where you are. The job looks fine until Stage 4, and then you discover Stage 3 ran long and there is no fee left. A single budget does not catch that. Stage-level tracking

#How to set this up

owntime models this as clients, projects, and tasks. For an architectural practice, the mapping is natural.

The client is the client. The project is the job. The tasks are the stages. Concept Design. Developed Design. Technical Design. Construction. Handover. Each task gets its own hours budget, and as you log time against a stage, you see that stage's budget fill independently.

This is not a special architecture mode. It is the standard project > task model, with the tasks named as stages. The budget alerts at 75, 90, and 100 percent fire per task, which in this case means per stage. Stage 3 hitting 90 percent shows you Stage 3 is in trouble, not that the whole job is fine and Stage 4 is about to inherit a problem.

#Variations, priced from real work

Architectural jobs change mid-job. A variation comes in, and you need to price it. The honest way to price a variation is from what the last similar work actually took, plus a margin for the unknown.

owntime gives you the "what the last work actually took" part. Your history is in the file. You can look up what a past stage actually billed and use it as the basis for the variation estimate. The estimate lives in the estimates view, line by line, with your terms. When the client accepts, one click converts it to an invoice draft. There is no retyping the scope into a separate invoice tool.

I will be direct about what this does not do. It does not do variation registers. It does not track revision clouds or planning conditions. It is a time tracker and invoicing tool, not a project management system for architects. The variation workflow is "estimate it, accept it, invoice it." If your practice needs a full variation management system, this is a piece of that, not the whole thing.

#Site visits and expenses that actually make the bill

A site visit generates hours and costs. The hours are easy, log them against the relevant stage. The costs are the part that tends to vanish. Travel. Materials for a mock-up. The structural engineer you brought to the review. These go on your card, and if they are not captured, they are just a loss.

owntime handles these as expenses with receipts. Log the expense, attach a photo of the receipt, mark it billable, and it sits against that client until the next invoice. When you invoice, the expense rides onto the invoice as its own line item, next to the hours. No separate disbursements document. No receipt you forgot to claim.

I want to be honest about the capture moment. The expense has to be logged. If you get back from a site visit and do not log it that day, it is easy to forget by Friday. The tool does not remind you about expenses the way idle detection reminds you about the timer. You still have to enter them. But once they are in, they stay billed.

#Invoicing at the milestone

Architectural invoicing tends to happen at stage completion, and the invoice needs to reflect the stage, not the whole job. Hours for Stage 3. Expenses for Stage 3. The fee you agreed for Stage 3, whether it came from an estimate you converted or from hours times a rate.

owntime's invoice builder lets you select the entries you want. Pick the unbilled entries for that stage, group them, add tax, export the PDF. The invoice is for Stage 3, clean, with the expenses itemized. The client sees what they are paying for, and you have a record of what Stage 3 actually cost you to deliver.

If your fee is milestone-based rather than hourly, you can invoice the flat fee and let the hours live in the background for your own cost tracking. The invoice does not have to match the hours exactly. It has to match what you agreed. The hours are for you. The invoice is for the client.

#The file stays yours

For a practice, the project file is a record that outlives the job. Years from now, a question comes up about what a stage actually took, and you need to be able to open the file and see.

Because the file is a local SQLite file at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db, it stays yours. It does not depend on a subscription being current. It does not depend on a server being up. You can open it in any SQLite browser, export it to CSV, hand it to your accountant. A twelve-person practice buys four licenses, three people each, and each person's file is their own archive.

#The honest limits

owntime does not do resource forecasting across the studio. If you need to see who is free to take on Stage 4 of a job while finishing Stage 2 of another, that is a different category of tool. It does not do drawing registers or planning-tracker integrations. It is time and invoicing, built for a practice that wants to own its data and bill in stages without a per-seat subscription.

If that is your practice, the stage-as-task model will feel familiar within a week. If you need the fuller project management layer, this is a companion to that, not a replacement.

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