As small businesses grow, administrative and operational work compounds. This is true even for teams specialising in more creative work, like building design and architecture. Architecture firms and similar small businesses still need to manage cash flow, organise projects, keep stakeholders engaged, track and nurture leads, and more.
Managing all this work can start to take its toll on your team, and you might turn to different tools to help keep up. You might use software to track time, another to manage payroll, and a third for project management. Eventually, managing all these tools – including admin work like subscription renewals and user permissions – can become a job of its own.
There has to be a better way to manage operational and admin work. And we’re pleased to let you know that there is. The right business management software for architects and building designers can help you efficiently manage all your essential business operations – in one place.
🎓 CAFLOU® academy is brought to you by CAFLOU® - 100% digital business management software
How does business management software help architects and building designers?
Business management software makes it easy to manage your internal business functions and client-facing ones. Here’s how.
1. Visibility into all your projects
Architecture businesses generally manage multiple projects at a given time, and the way a team manages each project defines its outcome. That’s why it’s important to have the right setup – one that lets you track milestones and tasks, engage relevant resources, monitor timelines, document important information, visualise projects in different views, and more. Gantt chart features are particularly helpful for architect teams because they help you track progress and visualise timelines.
Business management software with project management capabilities makes it easy to do all of the above – and more. For example, business management systems that include cash flow and client management capabilities let you track each project’s profitability and determine your most profitable customers. Teams can also bring customers on board, giving them visibility into the project’s progress and timelines.
2. Easily manage billing and quoting
While you can use a tool as low-tech as Excel to track billable hours, project payments, and expenses, using an integrated business management software for architects simplifies this administrative work. These systems make it easy to track the time individual team members are spending on each project and any associated expenses. When it’s time to invoice your client, generate a quote with a breakdown of billable hours and costs, ready for you to send.
3. Improve client relationships
Instead of using a separate tool for client interactions and relationships, a business management system with built-in customer relationship management (CRM) functionality lets you manage correspondence, client permissions and leads in one place. Having all your contacts on the same platform also means you can easily share updates, documentation, contracts, and more – instantly.
4. Manage cash flow and profitability
Cash flow and profitability are both vital for small architect businesses, but for different reasons. Your business’s overall profitability confirms that your business earns more than how much it costs to run. In other words, your model is sustainable – so the company has a future.
Understanding profitability at the project level helps businesses make smarter decisions as they grow, by analysing the reasons behind unprofitable projects and understanding what works for profitable ones. For example, choosing the wrong pricing model and inaccurately estimating the amount of work required can lead to unprofitability.
Let’s say an architectural firm chose to bill a client a fixed amount for some technical drawings, estimating the work to take 12 hours total. Now, let’s assume it takes 25 hours instead. Your business will need to compensate the employee(s) for these 13 additional hours that it hadn’t included in its estimations. The firm may learn from this and choose different pricing models in future, or change the way it makes estimations.
While profitability is important for sustainability, cash flow is more about survival. If your architectural business’s expenses exceed its income at any point, it’ll struggle to sustain operations and make payroll. That’s why it’s important to have real-time insights into your company’s cash flow—including the business’s income, whether payments are received on time, expenses, etc.
Business management software for architects and building designers gives you real-time insights into your business’s profitability and cash flow, including at the project level.
5. Collaborate with other team members and contractors
Architects and building designers are usually expected to work closely with other contractors on a project, in varying capacities. For example, a client’s requirements can range from asking you to provide them with technical drawings to overseeing an entire project’s construction as a project head.
So whether your business has other contractors, or the client chooses to engage external ones, your team will usually collaborate with other parties throughout a project’s lifecycle. This means coordinating timelines, sharing knowledge, and keeping each party updated is important.
A business management suite makes this easy by allowing you to add contractors to your contact lists, invite them to projects with customised access, and automatically notifying them about status updates and when they’re needed.
The best business management software for architects and building designers
We’ve spoken to different teams of building designers and architects about the tech stacks they used before switching to a business management suite like Caflou. Here’s what we’ve understood to be the 7 essential features of business management software for architects and building designers:
1. Time tracking and invoicing
Forget relying on manual timesheets or Excel; time-tracking features make it easy to track your entire team’s billable work on each project. This reduces your team’s manual work while giving clients more confidence and visibility into what they’re being charged for. Your business management suite should also let you generate project-specific invoices with a breakdown of the billable hours, and automatically share them with each respective client.
Internally, time tracking also gives you more insight into productive and unproductive hours (time spent on activities such as managing mistakes or rework) spent on individual projects. This helps the business identify where they’re losing productivity and take action to improve its operations over time.
It’s important to choose a business management software with automated time tracking that links the tracked time to individual projects and resources.
2. Project and task management
The best project management software for architects needs both:
- Core capabilities. This includes features to create and organise projects, display them in different views, create and assign tasks, manage task hierarchies, add milestones, and communicate with team members.
- Features that tie project management to cash flow and productivity. This means the platform gives insights into each project’s expenses and income, the clients they’re tied to, profitability, the time spent on them, etc.
When evaluating different business management suites, it’s important to consider more than just these core capabilities. The features linking project management to cash flow and productivity can help your business make smarter decisions about how it spends money and uses its resources.
3. Client-and-contractor relationship management
While a customer relationship management (CRM) tool can help every small business manage leads and pipelines, keep customers engaged, and remarket to old clients, architect firms and teams also use CRMs to organise each project’s stakeholders.
Architects and building designers will usually need to work with multiple stakeholders on each project—including the client and other contractors—so having the right infrastructure is important. CRM capabilities inside a business management suite mean you can not only engage relevant stakeholders at each stage but can also instantly give them visibility into the project and its progress.
4. Robust collaboration features
The best business management software for architects support various methods of communication and collaboration. This means 1:1 meetings, messaging, tagging stakeholders in a project, sharing status updates, assigning tasks, etc.
Having the right collaboration features helps teams align on critical tasks and maintain visibility into each other’s work, which is especially important for architects and business designers. This is because you’re generally working with other contractors whose work is dependent on yours.
5. Document management
Building designers and architects usually require documentation for both internal purposes and for working on projects, such as standard operating procedures (SOPs), permits, forms to apply for permits (such as planning permission) and licenses, and contracts for your clients and contractors. The right software lets you easily store and share documentation with relevant stakeholders at each stage of the project.
6. Integrations
Business management software can generally replace many other tools in your tech stack, such as CRM, time tracker, project management software, etc. But if your team is still using additional software, such as for setting up automations or internal comms, it’s a good idea to confirm if your business management suite integrates with them.
7. Automation
Automating repetitive, mundane work helps small businesses save time and improve efficiency. Think about what this might mean for your team of architects—automatic reminders for pending milestones, status updates sent to each stakeholder as a project progresses, contracts and invoices generated instantly, and more.
So when evaluating business management tools, it’s best to consider their automation capabilities as well. Some might include built-in automation features, while others may support integrations with third-party automation tools, like Zapier or Make. And some tools support both of these options!
Caflou: The best business and project management software for architects
So we’ve covered how a business management tool can help you out, and what makes a good one. Here’s why small architect businesses and teams choose Caflou for managing their projects and business:
1. Conveniently manage projects, tasks, and timelines
Organise your projects, plan their scope, define budgets, set deadlines, assign team members, add milestones, and more with Caflou. Visualise timelines and progress with different views, such as Gantt charts. Conveniently measure time with an automatic tracker and create timesheets to determine both the cost and price of your team’s work.
2. Manage all your contacts in one place
Use Caflou’s built-in CRM capabilities to manage relationships with leads, clients, and contractors. Instantly invite stakeholders to each project with customised user permissions and share essential documentation in the same platform.
Get a complete overview of your contractors, clients, and suppliers instantly. All your contacts, offers, contracts, invoices, projects, and documentation are organised and accessible in one place.
3. Get granular insights into your cash flow
Take control of your business’s lifeblood by automating financial management, tracking the profitability of individual projects, clients, and employees, and managing financial activities in one place. Track expenses and income for not just your whole business but also each project and client.
4. Time tracking, invoicing, and billing on autopilot
Caflou makes it easy to keep track of your work; automatically record billable hours for each project and get insights into where your team is losing productivity. Generate invoices on autopilot and have them sent to your clients, with automated follow-ups and reminders.
5. Automate tasks and processes
Caflou’s built-in workflow automation tool lets you automate mundane, repetitive tasks in the platform. Specify triggers, events, and actions to design custom automations. Caflou also integrates seamlessly with Make, a no-code third-party automation tool, to support more advanced automations.
Ready to replace your tech stack with a single, integrated business management suite? Get started with Caflou for free today.
<< Back to all articles in Caflou Business Management Academy