Stage 4 is finished, and so is the fee
A project director opens the monthly job report and sees that the stage 4 fee for a mid-sized residential scheme is gone. The structural package is mostly issued, but there are still coordination comments to close, a revised foundation layout to produce and a steel connection query from the fabricator. Every hour from here is unrecovered.
Nobody hid anything. The engineers booked their time honestly to the job number. The trouble is that the job number covers the whole commission, the fee was agreed stage by stage, and the report that compares the two arrives weeks after the hours were spent. By the time anyone sees the overrun, the only choices left are to absorb it or have an awkward conversation with the architect or client about additional fees.
Why the numbers arrive too late
- Time is booked to a project, not to the stage or work package the fee was agreed against.
- Fees live in the appointment document or a spreadsheet, not in the same place as the hours.
- Progress is a feeling in the project engineer's head, never written down as a percentage.
- Month-end reporting is assembled by the office manager from exports, so it runs behind.
- Rates differ by grade, so hours alone do not tell you how much fee has been used.
Most practices have the raw data. It sits in the timesheet system, the accounts package and the fee schedule, and nobody has joined them up in a way that answers the one question a director cares about: how much of this stage's fee have we used, and how much of the work is done?
What late fee visibility costs a practice
The cost is not only the overrun itself. It is the lost chance to act while the stage is live, when you could have raised a fee for the extra structural option the client asked for, pushed back on a late architectural change, or moved a senior engineer off work a graduate could do.
| When you see the overrun | What you can still do |
|---|---|
| Early in the stage | Rescope, raise additional services, change who does the work |
| Near the end of the stage | Ask for additional fees, from a weaker position and with thinner records |
| After the stage closes | Absorb it, and hope the next stage has room |
| At project close | Learn from it, if anyone reviews it |
Across a portfolio of live jobs, a handful of quiet overruns can decide whether a year was profitable, and it is usually the same types of project that overrun each time without anyone connecting the pattern.
How we build stage-level fee tracking
- We read your timesheet data through the API or scheduled export of whatever you use, whether that is Deltek, a practice management system, Harvest or a spreadsheet the team fills in.
- Each job number gets stage and work package codes that match how the fee was agreed, and the timesheet screen asks engineers to pick one, with sensible defaults so it does not slow them down.
- Hours are costed at your grade rates, so the tracker shows fee used, not just hours.
- Fees are entered once per stage from the appointment, including any agreed additional services.
- Each week the project engineer is asked one question per live stage: roughly how complete is it? The answer takes seconds and is stored with the date.
- The tracker compares fee used with progress and flags stages where spend is running ahead of the work.
- Directors get a short weekly list of drifting stages, and each flag links to the time entries behind it.
We keep the engineer's side of this light on purpose. If recording time by stage becomes a chore, people book everything to the first code in the list and the data is worthless. Most of the design effort goes into making the right code the easy one.
What directors see week to week
Instead of a month-end surprise, the Monday list shows which stages are burning faster than they are progressing. A director can open one, see that most of the hours went on a redesign after the architect moved the core, and decide that afternoon whether that is an additional service to raise.
Over time you also build a record of how long each type of stage really takes on each type of project, which makes the next fee proposal far easier to price honestly.
Does this sound like your practice?
- Overruns are discovered at month end or when invoicing a stage.
- Timesheets record the job but not the stage or package.
- Nobody can say what percentage of a stage is complete without asking the engineer.
- Additional fee requests are raised late because the evidence is hard to pull together.
- The same project types overrun repeatedly and nobody has the numbers to show it.