Architecture firms
You bill by phase against a fixed design fee, but the hours aren't fixed — and a phase can quietly eat its slice of the fee before anyone notices. Timix.AI tracks time by phase against its budget, alerts before the fee is spent, and shows profit per project at principal and drafter rates.
90-day free trial, full access, no credit card.
Illustrative entries
01 The problem
A design fee is locked the day you sign. The hours behind it aren't — and without a live view by phase, the fee looks fine right up until the phase that blew it is already finished.
Schematic, design development, construction documents — each phase carries a share of the fixed fee. When hours pile into one phase with no live burn against its budget, you discover the overrun at the phase close, after the time is already spent and the fee is already committed.
A principal's hour and a junior drafter's hour cost the firm very differently and earn very differently. If every hour rolls up at one rate, the per-project margin you're reading is an average that hides which projects — and which people — actually make money.
Extra rounds, scope beyond the agreement, 'quick' client requests — real billable effort that slides in as goodwill because nobody tracked it against the fee. Across a project that goodwill is the discount you never decided to give.
02 How Timix.AI fits
The hierarchy, per-phase budgets, and dual rates were built for fixed-fee work split into phases — which is exactly how a firm bills a building.
Organize work as project → phase → work item: in Timix.AI, each phase is a Task under the project, with work items as SubTasks beneath. Rates and billing types cascade down, so a project's whole phase structure lives in one tree. (You set up your own phases — there are no built-in AEC phase templates.)
Customer → Project → Task (your phase) → SubTask, with rates and billing types inheriting downward.
Give each phase its slice of the design fee as a fixed-amount budget at the Task level, with soft and hard limits. Timix.AI burns it down from live hours and alerts at the threshold you choose — so you catch the schematic phase running hot while there's still fee left to manage.
Budgets at Project, Task, or SubTask level; soft limits warn, hard limits stop, at the moment of entry.
Each person's hour carries a customer rate and a cost rate, so a principal and a drafter on the same phase bill and cost at the right numbers, and profit rolls up per phase and per project. Cost rates are effective-dated, so a raise doesn't rewrite a finished project's margin.
Dual rates plus effective-dated cost-rate history — margin math stays correct as salaries change.
Run fixed-fee design phases (Fixed Price) next to hourly additional services (T&M) next to non-billable internal time (OVH) in one project tree. Additional services finally get captured against a rate instead of disappearing into goodwill.
3 billing types — T&M, Fixed Price, OVH — coexist in one project tree.
03 Try it on your projects
Create a workspace, add a project, split it into phases with a slice of the fee on each, and set principal and drafter rates. Read fee burn per phase and profit per project on your own numbers — full access, every feature, every report, for 90 days, no card.
90-day free trial, full access, no credit card.
Prefer to look before you build anything? Live, pre-seeded demo workspaces are open to everyone — the IT-services and construction organizations show the same phase, budget, and margin mechanics on realistic data. Open the IT-services demo
04 FAQ
Yes — that's the core fit. Each phase is a Task under the project; give it a fixed-amount budget for its share of the fee, and Timix.AI burns it down from live hours with soft/hard limits and threshold alerts. You see a phase running hot while there's still fee to manage.
Timix.AI generates standard commercial invoices from your phase hours on Professional and up (line items, your tax rate, totals, a branded PDF) — but not construction-specific AIA G702/G703 percent-complete or draw documents. For those, export billing-ready data (PDF or CSV) to the tool your firm bills AIA with.
Yes. Rates are set per person and per entity and inherit down the tree, so principal and associate time on the same phase bill and cost correctly. Profit and margin roll up per phase and per project, and cost-rate history is effective-dated.
No — Timix.AI tracks labor hours and their cost and revenue, not sub-consultant invoices, reimbursables, or other expenses. Those live in your accounting tool; you can record references on entries with Custom Fields.
Ready when you are
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