For architects

Time tracking software for architects who bill by phase

Time tracking software for architects has to do one thing the generic stopwatch skips: understand that a project is not one number, it is a run of phases, each carrying its own fee and its own margin. BillNotch captures the hours automatically and files them where the money is actually decided.

BillNotch records your billable hours automatically while you work in Revit, AutoCAD, or a set of drawings, attributes them to the right phase, and turns approved time into a client invoice. No stopwatch, no Friday reconstruction, and phase-level margin without adopting a heavy practice-management suite.

Why time tracking software for architects has to think in phases

Architecture work is rarely billed at one flat rate. Schematic design, design development, construction documents, and construction administration each carry a different slice of the fee, a different staff mix, and a different amount of effort. A fee set as a percentage of construction cost, or a fixed lump split across phases, only tells you what you were paid. It says nothing about what each phase cost you to deliver.

Without hours logged against the phase, that gap stays invisible. CD runs three weeks long and swallows a principal’s time, CA drags on with unbilled site coordination, and the fee that looked healthy on the proposal turns out to have been carried by SD. You cannot fix a phase you cannot see. The first job of a tracker built for this work is to attach every hour to the phase it belongs to, so the margin is a number instead of a feeling. Turning those phase hours into a margin per commission is project profitability.

One project per phase, sorted by the file you have open

The setup is deliberately plain. Create a project for each phase under the client, or one project per commission with a keyword for each phase, and let the keyword rules do the filing. Revit, AutoCAD, Rhino, and SketchUp all show the open file in the window title, so a rule on the model name, the sheet-set prefix, or the project folder attributes that time as you draw.

Anything the rules are not sure about waits on the review screen rather than landing in the wrong place. That matters for a small studio where one person moves between three commissions in an afternoon: the record sorts itself while the work happens, and the review is a quick confirmation instead of an end-of-week excavation of your own memory.

Automatic capture across the whole drawing board

Capture is passive. The desktop app reads which application is in front and for how long, on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and there is no timer to start. It watches for idle, so a long lunch or a walk to the plan printer does not quietly become a billable hour. What reaches the server is the activity and its duration, not a screenshot and not a keystroke log, because there is no screen recording anywhere in the product.

The grid below is what that capture actually sees across a normal week in a studio.

Utilization by person, and the additional services no one billed

Every entry is billable or non-billable, and the reports roll that up per project and per member. That is your utilization in raw form: how much of each person’s week turned into fee, and how much went to internal reviews, software fights, and admin. You manage staffing and the next proposal on those numbers, not on a guess about who was busy. A studio does not need a formal utilization target wired into the software to use this. The billable share per person over a month is the figure principals already run staffing on, and now it comes from a record instead of a hunch.

Additional services are where the fee leaks hardest, because the extra round, the code variance, the client’s third revision all get done before anyone decides to bill them. Charging for that expansion instead of absorbing it is the subject of billing for scope creep. The Revenue Leak Finder rolls up billable time that has no invoice against it, along with hours stuck on no client and time that never got categorized, so the work you actually did shows up as a number you can go collect.

From phase hours to a client invoice

When a phase closes, you approve the entries and generate the invoice from the same tracked time. Lines are grouped by project, so a phase reads as its own block, and each line carries an hourly rate you can set on the client, the member, or the project. The result is a PDF with your terms and an optional payment link, in a single currency per invoice.

If your books live elsewhere, the finished invoice pushes to QuickBooks Online or Xero as an approved sales invoice, and the paid status flows back when the client settles. How invoicing works covers the full path from tracked hours to a sent document.

The phase numbers price your next fee

A fee, whether it is a percentage of construction cost or a lump sum split across the phases, is a bet on how many hours the work will take. Recording the actual hours against each phase turns every finished project into evidence for the next proposal. You stop guessing that DD usually runs long and start quoting from what DD actually took on three jobs like this one.

That is the quiet compounding win. Unlogged hours do not only cost you this invoice; on the next fixed fee they cost you three, because you re-quote a shape that lost money as though it made some. Passive capture keeps the hours honest without anyone maintaining a timesheet, so the number you carry into the next fee negotiation is a real one and not a hopeful memory of how the last job felt.

What this time tracking software for architects will not do

It is a tracker with invoicing, not a practice-management platform, and the honest edges matter. It does not hold a fee as a percentage of construction cost, it does not carry a budget per phase and warn you when you burn through it, and it does not do resource scheduling, forecasting, or staffing plans. There are no retainers, no expense tracking, and no timesheet approvals. It records your own team’s hours, so a subconsultant’s fee, a reimbursable, or a percentage-of-cost budget line is not something it carries; those belong in your accounting or project-accounting tool.

If you need firm-wide project accounting, Deltek and Monograph are built for exactly that and do it well. BillNotch sits under them, or on its own for a studio that mostly needs the hours captured, sorted by phase, and turned into an invoice. Running a larger practice with shared clients? The agencies page covers the team side.