For ten years our studio ran the way most practices in Lahore run. AutoCAD files lived in dated folders on a shared drive. The current revision was whichever one the project architect remembered issuing. Bills of quantities were spreadsheets that grew to thousands of rows and went out by email to whoever asked for them. Approvals happened in WhatsApp groups: one per project, one per site, and one more for the client who prefers voice notes. Accounts lived somewhere else entirely, and the question "has this stage been billed yet?" took an afternoon to answer.
None of that is unusual. It is how the profession works here, and it works in the sense that buildings get built. But it leaks. It leaks time, it leaks fees, and occasionally it leaks a wall built from a superseded drawing.
This year we moved the studio onto a single system: Ofivio. This is an account of what actually changed, including the parts that were uncomfortable.
Disclosure: ARKA and Ofivio share a founder. We are writing about the software because we use it every day and because practices here should know it exists, not because anyone paid for a review. We have tried to keep this factual rather than promotional.
What we were actually losing
Before we could judge any system, we had to be honest about the cost of the old one. Over a few months we wrote down where studio time disappeared. Four things came up again and again.
The first was searching. Finding the current version of a drawing, an old approval, a supplier quote from last year. Individually these are two-minute problems. Collectively they consume hours a week per person.
The second was unbilled work. Stages were completed and nobody raised the invoice, because the person who knew the stage was finished was not the person who issued bills. Money we had earned sat uninvoiced for months.
The third was lost decisions. A client approves a layout in a chat thread. Four months later the same client asks why the kitchen is where it is. The approval exists somewhere in nine hundred messages, and finding it costs more than conceding the point.
The fourth was key-person risk. Every project lived substantially in one person's head. When they took leave, the project slowed down. When they left the firm, a part of it walked out of the door.
Why generic project tools did not fit
We tried the obvious tools first. They are good at lists. A practice does not run on lists. A practice runs on deliverables that must be issued, approved, recorded and billed, in an order that the profession has agreed on for a century.
Ofivio's own framing of this, on its explainer page, is that it is not a generic project tool bent to fit, and that it speaks the industry's language: BOQs, drawings, milestones, site supervision. That sounds like marketing until you have spent a week trying to make a task app represent a drawing revision. The company has written about this deliberate narrowness on its page about building for a niche, and having tried the alternative, we think the argument is correct.
What "one system" actually means
The idea underneath Ofivio is a shared project spine. A project exists once, and every part of the business writes to that same record. The phrase used on the how it works page is that there is one record, with nothing carried across by hand.
That last part is the whole point. In our old setup, information was copied constantly: from drawing register to email, from email to invoice, from invoice to the accounts file. Every copy was an opportunity to introduce an error, and every error took an afternoon to trace.
The rooms we actually live in
Ofivio Architecture organises a practice into rooms rather than modules. Studio holds drawings, revisions and design stages. Manager turns an enquiry into a job with stages, a team and a client. Bills handles quantities and invoicing. Staff, HR and Finance cover the rest of the business.
In practice we spend our days in three of them. Studio, because that is where the work is. Manager, because that is where the week is planned. Bills, because that is where the practice survives.
Drawings and revisions
Every issued drawing now carries, in the system's own words, a reason, an author and a paper trail. The register is not a spreadsheet somebody maintains; it is a consequence of issuing the drawing.
If your office has never used formal transmittals, Ofivio's explainer on what a drawing transmittal is is the right place to start, and its page on drawing management shows how registers, revisions and issue records sit together. We wrote separately about why this discipline matters on site in managing drawing revisions.
The change we felt most: the argument about which drawing the contractor had simply stopped happening.
Approvals, without asking clients to learn software
This was the part we expected to fail. Our clients are not going to log into a system to approve a plan. Ofivio's client portal was built around that reality, and approvals now arrive as a record attached to the stage rather than as a message in a thread.
The value is not the convenience. It is that six months later, the approval is still there, with a date on it. Ofivio's article on client approvals in architecture projects makes the case better than we can.
Stages that bill themselves
The single biggest financial change was linking approval to invoicing. When a stage is approved, the bill for that stage is raised. It sounds trivial. It closed the leak that had been costing us the most.
If you want the professional structure behind this, Ofivio sets out the design stages of an architecture project, and we have written our own client-facing version in the design stages of a house project.
VO, the part we were sceptical about
Every product has an AI feature now, and most of them are a chat box bolted to the side. VO is positioned differently: an officer rather than an assistant. It listens in Urdu and English, it runs long jobs, and every action passes a permission gate, so it can only read what your own login may read.
We were sceptical, and we remain selective. We use it for the things it is genuinely good at: summarising where a project stands, drafting the tedious letter, finding the decision nobody can remember. We do not let it approve anything. The design is explained on the VO page, and the permission model is the reason we were willing to switch it on at all.
On site, on a phone
Most of our team is not at a desk when the information is needed. Site engineers are on their phones, standing next to the thing they are asking about. Everything above works from a phone, which is covered on Ofivio's mobile page. If it had not, we would have gone back to WhatsApp within a fortnight.
Security and the question every client asks
If you are keeping client drawings, contracts and financial records in one place, you should ask who can see them. We did, in some detail, before moving anything. Ofivio publishes its posture on its trust page, with role-based access, two-factor authentication and encryption. Read it properly, the way you would read a contract.
What it costs
The pricing is unusually plain for this industry. A single user can work free indefinitely. The paid bands for the design and construction products start at USD 10 a month for up to five people, with larger bands for bigger teams, and VO's voice and officer tiers are priced per seat on top. For a Pakistani practice, the part that matters is that billing works in rupees through EasyPaisa, JazzCash and bank transfer, and annual payment gives two months free. Current figures are on the pricing page, and they will be more accurate than this paragraph.
Set against one junior salary, the arithmetic was not difficult.
What it asked of us
This is the part most reviews skip.
- Our data was a mess. Migration exposed a decade of inconsistent project naming and drawing numbering. The system did not create that problem, but it would not paper over it either.
- Discipline is not optional. A register is only true if everyone issues through it. For the first month, two of us policed that daily.
- Habits die slowly. The WhatsApp groups did not disappear. They shrank, and they stopped being the place where decisions were made.
- It is not a design tool. Drawing still happens in AutoCAD and Revit. This runs the practice around the drawing, not the drawing itself.
Expect a month where the studio is slower. We did not, and that first month was bad tempered.
Who should not bother
If you are one person doing two houses a year, a shared folder and an honest spreadsheet will serve you. The case gets strong at the point where you cannot personally hold every project in your head: roughly four or five people, or more projects than you can list from memory. Ofivio's notes on running a small practice profitably and on whether architects should use timesheets are a fair test of whether you are at that point.
There is also a specifically local argument. Imported practice software assumes fee structures, tax treatment and approval processes that are not ours. Ofivio's overview of software for architecture firms in Pakistan and its page for architecture practices describe the gap we kept hitting with foreign tools, and its practice management page sets out what it puts in place of them.
Where we are now
Drawings have one register. Approvals have dates. Stages raise their own invoices. When someone is on leave, their projects keep moving because the project does not live in their head any more.
The work itself has not changed. We still draw, argue about proportion, and stand on dusty sites explaining the same detail three times. What changed is the quantity of studio life spent reconstructing what we already knew.
If you run a practice here and recognise the folder-and-chat-group life, it is worth an afternoon of your time to look. Ofivio's getting started page is where we began, and our own account of the wider shift is in how architecture studios in Pakistan are getting organised.
And if you are a client wondering why any of this matters to you: it is why your drawings are consistent, your approvals are remembered, and your invoices match the work. You can see how we run projects on our process page, or talk to us about a project.