Reporting for Architecture Practices on Fee Proposals, Qualification and Start Dates

Architecture practices are wary of sales reporting, and with reason. Most of it is designed for teams selling a repeatable product to a defined buyer, which describes nothing about winning an appointment for a building. The reports below are built around the two things that genuinely determine a practice year: which enquiries were worth senior time, and which proposals were followed through.

Fee proposal ageing

Proposals issued, by owner, with days since issue and days since the last contact. It decides who gets a call this week. A bad number is a group of proposals over a month old with no follow up recorded, which in practice means the work was not lost, it was simply never pursued.

Enquiry qualification status

Enquiries grouped by whether the site, approvals, funding and start date are real, with senior hours attached. It decides how first conversations are handled. A bad number is a large share of principal time spent on enquiries with none of the four in place, which is the most common way a practice loses a quarter without noticing.

Pipeline by expected start month

Live opportunities arranged by when the project would actually begin. It decides staffing and recruitment. A bad number is several projects all expecting to start in the same month, which is not a pipeline so much as a scheduling problem waiting to arrive.

Proposed against agreed fee

Fee quoted and fee agreed, by project type and partner, over a rolling period. It decides fee policy and scope definition. A bad number is a consistent modest reduction across many appointments, which is far more damaging over a year than the occasional large concession that everybody remembers and discusses.

Loss reasons from a closed list

Why appointments went elsewhere. It decides positioning and where the practice should seek work. A bad number is fee level recorded for nearly every loss, which usually means the list is too coarse and is hiding timeline expectations, design and build procurement and clients who never had funding at all.

Proposal ageing. It needs one habit, which is logging each fee proposal when it is issued, and it produces immediate results because the outstanding proposals are usually still live. Qualification reporting is second and takes a little more courage, since it requires asking new enquiries direct questions early rather than after two enjoyable design conversations.

None of these is about ranking architects. Each exists to protect senior time and to stop work being lost through silence.

Every enquiry logged with a source and an owner, including the ones that arrive through a partner personally. Qualification fields captured at first contact. Fee proposals recorded when issued, with the proposed figure preserved rather than overwritten at appointment. Expected start dates maintained as they change. Competition entries logged with committed hours. Loss reasons from a closed list, entered by the partner who ran the pursuit.

Enquiries by month, meetings held and a chart of projects by sector are the usual candidates. Enquiry volume in a practice is small enough that a monthly chart is noise. Meeting counts reward being agreeable to everyone who calls. Sector charts move once a year at most. If a report does not either protect senior time or recover a proposal that would otherwise be forgotten, it is not doing anything a practice needs.

It does not record time against project stages, calculate work in progress, raise fee invoices or maintain your drawing registers. Practice management, accounting and document systems continue to do all of that. This is the business development record that sits before a project is ever opened.

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