Architecture school teaches design, history, structures and enough services to be dangerous. It does not teach you how to price a commission, when to invoice, what to do when a client stops answering the phone, or how to run payroll for eleven people in a month when three clients have paid late.
Most of us learn that half of the profession by getting it wrong for several years. This is an account of how we stopped getting it wrong quite so often, by moving the business side of the studio onto the same system that runs the design side.
Disclosure: ARKA and Ofivio share a founder. We use these products to run this practice, which is the only reason we can describe them at this level of detail. Read it as a practitioner's account rather than an independent review.
The dual fee problem
Practices here charge for two different things that clients often believe are one thing: designing the building, and supervising its construction. The work, the risk and the timeline of those two services are completely different, and so is the money.
Design fees are earned across a few months against defined deliverables. Supervision fees are earned across two or three years against site attendance. When both sit in one line in one contract, neither gets tracked properly. The practice discovers at the end of a project that the supervision it has been providing for eighteen months was never separately billed.
Ofivio's article on design fee versus supervision fee sets out why these should be priced and contracted separately, and it has a piece specifically on accounting for a dual fee structure, which is the part no general accounting package handles.
Fees that follow stages instead of the calendar
The change that made the largest difference to our cash position was tying fee milestones to stages rather than to months.
When a stage is approved, the milestone is earned and the invoice follows. Nobody has to remember. Nobody has to ask the project architect whether schematic design is finished, then ask the client whether they agreed, then dig out the contract to find the percentage.
Ofivio's breakdowns of fee structure by stage and of the fee models compared are the clearest short treatments we have found, and its survey of architect fees in Pakistan is the piece we now send to clients who ask what is normal here. We wrote our own client-facing version in what architect fees actually pay for.
Accounting as a consequence, not a second job
The line that convinced us to move the books was that accounting should be a consequence of the work, not a second job.
In the old arrangement, work happened in one place and was re-entered as accounting in another, weeks later, usually by someone who had not done the work. Errors were inevitable and the books were always slightly behind reality.
Ofivio Books writes the ledger from what already happened. Double-entry posting, a proper chart of accounts, bank reconciliation line by line, and invoices that go out with the record behind them. The accounting page covers the general case.
Construction does things to a ledger that ordinary accounting does not expect
Retention held for a year. Advances recovered gradually across certificates. Materials paid for before they are consumed. Variations that change a contract sum after the contract is signed. Certificates that are cumulative rather than discrete.
A general bookkeeping package treats each of these as an awkward exception. Ofivio's guide to double-entry construction accounting explains why they are not exceptions at all, and its construction accounting page covers how they are handled as normal events.
For us the practical result is that project profitability is now a report rather than a research project. We can see which project is making money while it is still running, which is the only time that information is useful.
Payroll, advances and the things nobody writes down
Payroll in a Pakistani studio is not just salaries. It is advances against salary, a loan for a wedding, leave that was never recorded, a warning letter, and the annual argument about increments.
That was a notebook and a spreadsheet, and the notebook was mine. Ofivio People took it over: payroll runs, advances, warnings and staff letters in one place, with a record that survives me being unreachable. The payroll page covers the mechanics, and its piece on payroll software for small businesses in Pakistan speaks to local conditions rather than assuming an American HR department.
The work before the work
Enquiries, proposals, follow-ups. Most practices here run this on memory and on whether the principal happened to call someone back.
Ofivio Business holds enquiries and proposals in the same account as the projects they turn into, so the brief a client described in March is still attached to the job that starts in June. For the parts of a practice that no product anticipates, Ofivio OS lets you describe what your business does and shapes itself around that, and repetitive sequences can be handed to Automate.
VO, used carefully
The system's AI layer, VO, is presented as an officer rather than a chat window: it listens in Urdu and English, it can run long tasks, and every action passes a permission gate so it can only reach what the person using it may reach, with an audit record of what it did.
Our rule is narrow and has not changed: VO drafts and summarises, people approve. It writes the first version of a letter, tells me which fee milestones are overdue, and finds the decision from four months ago. It does not approve drawings, it does not issue certificates, and it does not touch the ledger.
The questions to ask before you put your practice in one place
Consolidation is a real risk as well as a benefit. Everything in one system means everything in one system. Before moving our contracts, drawings and books, we asked the questions any principal should ask: who can see what, what happens if a laptop is lost, whether data can be exported, and what the backup position is. The answers are published on the trust page. Read it properly, and ask your own questions before you migrate anything.
What it costs a practice like ours
The back-office products start free for a single user and at USD 5 a month for a small team; the design and construction products start at USD 10; and a complete bundle caps the whole thing for a firm. VO's voice and officer tiers are charged per seat on top. Billing works in rupees through EasyPaisa, JazzCash and bank transfer, with two months free on annual payment. The pricing page carries the current figures.
The comparison worth making is not against free spreadsheets. It is against the fee we failed to invoice last year, which was a larger number than several years of subscription.
Chasing payment without losing the client
Every practice here knows this problem. The fee is due, the client is a friend of a friend, and the person who has to make the call is the same person who has to keep the relationship.
What helped was making the request impersonal. A statement showing the stage, the date it was approved, the amount earned and what remains outstanding is not an accusation; it is a document. Sending it on a schedule, rather than when frustration finally wins, changed the tone of those conversations more than any negotiating tactic we had tried.
The reminders now arrive without me. Each morning the system says what is due, late, or waiting on someone, which means the awkward call happens two weeks earlier, while it is still a small number.
What we still do outside the system
Not everything moved, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.
Tax filing still goes to our accountant. Bank dealings are still bank dealings. Contract drafting still involves a lawyer for anything substantial, and should. Some clients will only ever communicate by phone, and we have stopped trying to change that; someone writes down what was agreed afterwards, which was always the real requirement.
The system is where the practice's record lives. It is not a substitute for professional advice, and we have not treated it as one.
What we would tell another practice
Start with whichever leak is costing you most. For most practices it is billing, not drawings. Move one workflow, insist on it for a month, then move the next. A tool nobody uses consistently is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced, because now there are two records and neither is trusted.
If you want the overview before committing to anything, Ofivio's what is Ofivio is the short version, and how the products work together explains the shared account model that makes the connections possible.
The part that actually changed
We are not better designers because of any of this. The buildings are the same buildings.
What changed is that the practice around the design stopped losing things. Fees are invoiced when they are earned. Salaries are paid without a week of preparation. When a client asks what was agreed, the answer takes a minute rather than an afternoon. That is not a revolution in architecture. It is a revolution in how much of an architect's week is spent doing something other than architecture, and after a decade of the alternative, that is enough.
To see how we run projects from brief to handover, read about our process, or get in touch if you are planning a project.
