For jobs that live in stages
Track by stage. Bill by milestone. Keep the file.
Studio work is long, staged, and full of site visits that cost money. owntime lets you budget hours by stage, price a variation from what past stages really took, and invoice when the milestone hits. One file per studio, kept for years.
One payment. No rent. File is yours.
Architecture — straight talk
The parts that usually go sideways.
Stage 4 eats Stage 3's fee
Make each stage a project with its own hours budget: concept, developed, technical, handover. The bar fills in real time, so when technical starts eating developed's fee you see it in week two, not at the final account.
Site visits vanish from the bill
Log the visit as time and snap the travel receipt on site. Both wait as billable items until the next invoice. Mileage, prints, model materials. If it served the job, it bills to the job.
Fee proposals live in a spreadsheet
Write the estimate line by line in the app. If they say yes, convert it to an invoice with one click. The lines, the tax, the notes all carry over. No retype, no drift.
Old jobs are archaeology
Years of jobs sit in one searchable file. When a client asks why the extension cost what it did in 2023, you open the entries and read the notes instead of guessing.
What you’ll actually use
Just the bits you bill for.
Stages, not just projects
Client holds the whole commission, each stage holds its own budget. Long jobs finally read right, and post-mortems take ten minutes.
Estimate becomes invoice
Draft the fee, send it, get a yes, convert. Fixed-fee lines and hourly lines can share one invoice when the deal is mixed.
Years in one place
One file per studio, archived with the job records. No per-seat tax for a 12-person practice, no export scramble when someone leaves.
Site costs ride along
Billable expenses with receipt photos attach to the job and print on the invoice. Disbursements stop leaking.
And the rest of owntime
Timers, timesheets, invoices with tax, expenses with snaps, estimates, per-client currency, CSV you can hand to anyone — the full list.
Set it up like this
Your world, in your trade’s words.
First run: pick Architecture
Stages for projects, Work kind for tasks, and variation tags (VO1, VO2) suggested as you type. owntime seeds Drawings, Coordination, Site, Admin and turns the estimate view into Fee proposals. Accent: slate blue.
Client = the client or developer
One record, one currency. All stages and variations roll up here.
Project = a stage
Smith house: concept, developed, technical, site. Each with the hours you allowed in the fee bid.
Tasks = the work kind
Drawings, coordination, site, admin. Same tasks across stages so stage-to-stage comparison means something.
Tags = the variation
Tag entries with VO1, VO2. When the variation bill comes, the hours are already grouped.
A week in owntime
How the work actually flows.
Bid: estimate from history
Open a similar past stage, read what it really took, write the new fee from that number. Hope leaves the process.
Run: log against the stage
Timers or end-of-day entries, notes autocompleted. The stage bar fills where everyone can see it.
Vary: tag and price
Variation work gets tagged from day one. Price the VO from real tagged hours, convert the accepted estimate to an invoice.
Bill: milestone day
Pull unbilled stage time plus waiting expenses onto the invoice. Send the PDF. The file keeps the whole story.
What the client sees
A bill that looks like you wrote it.
| Description | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 3 — Developed Design (14 entries) | 38h | $95 | $3,610 |
| Site visit — structural review | 2h | $95 | $190 |
| Expense: Model materials | — | — | $310 |
| Total | $310 | ||
Plain lines, your letterhead, your numbers. PDF, made locally. No server in the middle.
Straight talk
What it will not do.
Every tool has edges. Here are ours, plainly, so you find out now and not in month three.
- ×Budgets count hours, not fee burn. If you need cost-weighted tracking across grades, the app will not do that math.
- ×No drawing links, no BIM, no document control. Time and money only, done well.
- ×No multi-user sync. One file per machine, mirrored through your own sync folder if the studio needs a second seat to read it.
Asked a lot
Questions architecture people ask.
How do we handle stage fees that are fixed?
Log hours against the stage for your own control, then bill a fixed-fee line at the milestone. Cost control and billing stay separate, as they should.
Can variations become invoices?
Yes. Write the variation as an estimate, and when accepted convert it. The tagged hours behind it are your backup if questioned.
What about site expenses?
Billable expenses with receipt photos attach to the job and print on the invoice. Travel, prints, materials.
How long can we keep records?
As long as you keep the file. It is yours, offline, with rolling local backups. Studios archive it with the job folder.
Test it on a real week.
14 days, full app. If it doesn’t survive your busy week, don’t pay. Simple.
Other worlds: