Run a Full Project Profit Audit and Protect CA Margins
Most small architecture firms don’t track profitability per project, per phase, or per client type. They know their overall revenue but not which project types run profitable through CD and then bleed out during CA. Scope creep during Construction Administration quietly erodes margins until the project that looked profitable on paper turns into a loss. This guide walks you through a full profit audit across at least 10 projects, a rebuild of your phase fee split, labour multiplier, and consultant pass-through margin from that data, a CA scope tracker, and a weekly margin-protection habit. It is built for architecture practices specifically — for generic scope-proof proposal language, the free Project Profitability guide covers that. Works for residential, commercial, and institutional firms of 2–50 people.
What You’ll Get
- An effective hourly rate calculated per project, per phase (SD/DD/CD/CA), and per project type
- A ranked list of project types, clients, and phases where you’re actually losing money
- A corrected phase fee split (SD/DD/CD/CA), break-even and net multiplier, and consultant markup calculated from your own hours
- A CA scope tracker with standard allowances for RFIs, site visits, and submittal rounds
- A weekly 15-minute margin review habit that catches erosion early
Step-by-Step Guide
Pull project financials for 10+ completed projects
The audit is only as good as the data. Gather 10–15 recent projects with enough detail to separate phase performance.
Data you need
For each project: name, type (residential/commercial/TI/institutional), client type (developer/owner-occupier/nonprofit), contracted fee, additional services billed, consultant fees passed through (and what you billed for them), hours by phase (SD/DD/CD/CA) and by staff role (principal/PA/designer/drafter), hourly billing rates, project duration, and a qualitative note on scope creep events.
I run a [FIRM SIZE]-person architecture firm and I'm about to pull financials on 10–15 completed projects for a phase-level profit audit. My time tracking lives in [TOOL — e.g. Harvest, BQE Core, Deltek Ajera, spreadsheets] and my invoicing lives in [TOOL]. Please give me: 1. A spreadsheet column layout for the audit — one row per project, with columns for fee, additional services billed, consultant fees passed through and what we billed for them, hours by phase (SD/DD/CD/CA) split by role (principal/PA/designer/drafter), billing rate per role, duration, and a scope-creep notes column 2. Which reports to export from the tools I named to fill each column, and which columns I'll probably have to rebuild by hand 3. A short list of data-quality checks to run before I trust the numbers (e.g. hours logged to "general" or "admin" on a project, CA hours logged after the project closed, phases with zero hours that obviously had work) 4. How to treat projects with incomplete hour tracking so they don't distort the averages — include them with a flag, or drop them
Run a multi-dimensional profit audit
AI can rip through the numbers and surface patterns that would take a weekend to spot manually.
I want a full profit audit across my last 10–15 projects. I need to see profitability by project, by phase, by project type, and by client type. Here is my project data: [PASTE DATA — for each project: name, type, client type, contracted fee, additional services billed, hours by phase and role, billing rates, duration, scope creep notes] Please analyze: 1. **Effective hourly rate per project** — total fee (including additional services) ÷ total hours 2. **Phase-level profitability** — for each phase (SD/DD/CD/CA), what percentage of the total fee did each phase actually consume in hours × rates? Flag any phase that consistently runs over budget. 3. **Project type profitability** — rank my project types by average effective hourly rate. Which types are most/least profitable? 4. **Client type patterns** — are certain client types (developers, owner-occupiers, nonprofits) systematically more or less profitable? 5. **CA erosion flag** — any project where CA hours exceeded 25% of the contracted fee 6. **Staff mix issues** — projects where principal/senior hours ran higher than typical (too much senior time on CDs suggests a PA capacity problem) 7. **Scope creep correlation** — cross-reference the scope creep notes with actual hour overruns 8. **Top 3 findings** — plain language, what are the patterns I need to act on first Finally, calculate what my firm-wide profit margin would be if I: (a) Fixed the worst-performing project type (b) Contained CA to budget on every project (c) Improved my staff mix on my most frequent project type
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