Archioffice software

You can contact the vendor for pricing details or to get a quote. The data is then presented in an easy to digest form showing how many people had positive and negative experience with ArchiOffice. PROS: The best part is that it is easy to set it up and use. The support offers a very feature rich program for specifically for architects. It is also reasonably intuitive since we don't like to read "how to" documents or instructions.

We have recommended this program to our colleagues because it is very efficient. CONS: Since we use Mac computers, it was dissapointing when the program started to require a Windows operation system to run the server because we don't like all the updates required when running Windows.

PROS: The support personnel are very helpful and supportive. Even without an architectural background, their training sessions equipped me with skills to use ArchiOffice. The training program and monthly webinars are very informative and helped me with the use of the product. The dashboard and the calendar needs to be updated.

I wish that it could work with mobile devices across provider platforms. That is a big advantage to us because we prefer to calculate real-time than after the fact.

Second, I wish I could sort out data by due date because there is no option to sort out the submittals, rfi's and ,asi's logs. Third, I wish I could see all logs on the same page using the scroll function rather than using the page view navigation. PROS: The best part is that ArchiOffice is created to for architectural practice and how we handle projects and invoice them. Unlike before where you had to have a FileMaker Pro server or other in-house server dedicated to the software that made IT management a real pain, currently we switched to the online version and all the troubles went away.

CONS: Currently the upgrades are very minimal and light-weight. A submittal tracking was added without a place to add a submittal number. I hope the next upgrades will fix this problem. Thank you for the time you take to leave a quick review of this software.

Our community and review base is constantly developing because of experts like you, who are willing to share their experience and knowledge with others to help them make more informed buying decisions. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape.

I downloaded this app for a client and tried to log in. The app just spins. It doesn't give an error, it doesn't even time out. It just spins. The developer will be required to provide privacy details when they submit their next app update. With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.

App Store Preview. Description ArchiOffice, a simple-to-use project management and time tracking software created by architects, for architects, is now available for your iPhone. Mar 8, Version 6.

Ratings and Reviews. App Privacy. Regardless of what those employees are doing or how much they are working on anything, the amount of money that has to go out the door in paychecks every week or two is essentially constant and known in detail.

The other side of that equation, fee revenue, is mostly dependent on work completion, delivery of work products, and meeting critical milestones. If you've delivered a set of design documents, you can bill for them. If you haven't, you can't. So, on the one hand, we have a bunch of money going out the door every couple of weeks in paychecks, rent, etc. That has to be offset by revenue from completed work.

How many hours somebody has worked on a particular project or job number is, at best, only secondarily and tangentially connected to that key financial reality. What matters is that stuff gets done, deliverables are delivered in a timely fashion, and key contractual milestones are met. Do that, and the money becomes Accounts Receivable to offset your Accounts Payable. The faster you can convert your contracts and work to AR, the more profitable you will be. If you take any one point away from this little rant, it should be that one.

If, on the other hand, I am basing my project accounting on labor budgets and diligently tracking time cards and hours spent, I can wind up with some really perverse results and fool myself into thinking I'm profitable when I absolutely am not. This is a common failing in architectural practices, which adopted time-based accounting from lawyers back in the s and cling to its Labor Theory of Value logic with grim determination despite its obvious problems.

For instance, a few years ago during the darkest days of the downturn, one of my project managers was bragging about how one his projects was in the black by a large margin. He had accomplished this by reducing his team size to just two people and getting time extensions on several key deliverable milestones so he could reduce the number of hours spent on the project in any given budget period. As a result, he was showing a metric of hours spent way below budget, and thus claiming this as a highly profitable job.

But it was a financial disaster. Two reasons. One: by delaying all the work and slowly feeding hours into it, he had effectively tripled the overhead cost on that project because it was going to be active in the office for much longer and dramatically delayed revenue inflows to billed from it. In effect, he had throttled the cash flow from AR on that job way down.

Two: even though he'd reduced staff hours on his project to low part-time, we still had to pay those staff full time. Just because he had them billing only 10 hours a week on that job didn't mean we didn't have to pay them for In the boom times, this problem was masked because slack staff get picked up to do other work as soon as they're available or even before.

In the downturn, many other projects had gone on hold, so those staff wound up being idled. Now, when I suggested to him that we take four almost fully-idled staff from elsewhere in the office and have them all put in a crash effort to get that project done immediately, the PM had a conniption.

Putting all those people on his project would blow the budget, he claimed. He didn't want to be responsible for losing money on a project he was responsible for. Rather than taking available staff to get his project finished quickly, so he could bill for completed contract amounts in the near future and thus bring a much-needed cash flow into the company to offset ongoing fixed costs such as the staff salaries, including his own team members , he was fixated on the metric of managing his hours budgeted vs.

He was convinced that he was profitable, when in fact he was responsible for the company hemorrhaging money due to labor-accounting myopia. To be fair, this was a rational response on his part. Because the accounting and project management systems and metrics being used in the firm measured his success as a PM against his project hours budgets as a proxy for profitability, and did not take percent completion, periodic milestone billing, or AR conversion into account AT ALL.

That's why I warned against adopting PM solutions that are heavily time-accounting based for an architectural practice. I know that a lot of architects do it, to the point where it's standard practice in the profession. But that doesn't mean that it makes any sense to do so. Mostly, it's just habit, and a really bad one at that. Let me ask you this: if your firm quit tracking hours and filling out timesheets tomorrow, would it really, I mean REALLY, change your cash flow and profitability situation?

If not, why are you still doing it? Everybody hates it. Punching a timecard is for burger flippers, not professionals. It's wasteful of both time and resources. It focuses employee attention and behavior on poor metrics of financial performance, and gives them perverse incentives. The answer is probably that you track time because someone told you once that that's what architects have always done to manage their business. Well, not only is that not true prior to the s, it was extremely rare , it's not a sensible way to make decisions about how you manage your work and pursue profitability.

Greg, all of what you've said makes a lot of sense. However, don't many practices still bill their clients based on time, or hours not lump contract-sums?

I don't know of any offices that bill time and materials who are not doing a lot of government work many govt agencies require time accounting statements even if the contract is lump sum Your profit margins will thank you. And, frankly, why on earth would you ever want to work under a system where all hours spent are treated as fungible and equal in value? Is the 30 minutes you spent coming up with a great idea for a project design equal in value to the 30 minutes you spent retroactively concocting the fiction of your time report out of fantasy and foggy recollection on timesheet day?

We would like feedback. We would appreciate the opporutnity to discuss your experience and learn if it has been useful to your Firm and if you have any tips to help us in its use. We are a 9 person firm in the Atlanta area that has been using Archioffice since Since that time, there have been a lot of growing pains.

However, over that time, I've also spent time with Tech support, bent ears and learned a lot about the program. I've now been a beta tester for the past two years, and have seen the product evolve greatly. We intially got into the software to get out of the spreadsheets. With all the lost mileage, printing and other reimbursables we were missing, it easily paid for itself. Then we got into the time tracking, reimbursable tracking, joint address book location, productivity reports, shared calendar, and most importanly - billing.

Recently, we have gone paperless well as much as an architect can be and begun using the document management aspect. Shop drawing, submittal and RFI logs are also somehting our project managers have begun using recently. Overall, if an architects office does it, there is some aspect of Archioffice that attemps to recreate it.

Albeit, you may have to adjust your method a bit to accomodate Archioffice's method. The program can also be highly customized, i. Many areas are this way. Then there is also remote access to the program. It is internet based, inside your office. Because we use doncument management also, all that is also remotely accessible. Recently one of our project managers used their iPad to access Archioffice from the job site to call up a spec section to read it to the contractor a contractor without his specs, what a surprise!

But we can also call up RFI, submittal status, check contact info, etc. All from the office, home or on the road. Just need the IP and a web browser. It syncs relatively well to outlook. It Syncs to Quickbooks, but that is an area that we have decided not to use. Our experience is that it has taken us time to adopt the whole program to our methods, and likewise our methods to Archioffice. But each year we pick up more of what it does. Always more than we intially bought Archioffice for.

One of the best side benefits is that it has forced an office standard upon ourselves, forcing everyone to do their process roughly the same way.

We have done several upgrades from V8 to ouch all the way to Only once did we have problems. But Tech support is awesome! Easy to get hold of and rarely do I have a problem not solved that day. I think you'll find that doing away with time accounting, writing lump-sum contracts, and eliminating all cost-related statements or information from your bills to clients will reduce disputes with them over fees considerably.

Honestly, how much time you spent doing the work or how much it cost you to do it is none of the client's business. It's yours and yours alone. Price on value, manage on cost. The only pertinent issue for fee billing is: did I provide the value and products I promised to provide for the price we had agreed on in the time frame I promised?

Pay me. To develop the fee, the time and logistics of completing the project are the primary basis for the fee estimate, yes? To put it in the terminology you were using, to estimate accounts payable to complete a project, since most of it is salaried fixed overhead cost, the estimator has to estimate the amount of time salaried employees will take to complete the work. And then to assess how well one anticipated the needed time to complete the work accounts payable you have to track their time.

If you don't need the time on task info to manage the project while ongoing which is a valid point in many instances , it is valuable to figure out how well the project was estimated, or if the estimator is getting more accurate over successive iterations of estimating a particular project type.

Do you agree with that, or am I missing something? This is all primarily based on time estimates. Tracking time is NOT essential. In fact, it's a distraction and tells you nothing of value from a business or financial management standpoint.

Our profession is wedded to doing it simply because we've been doing it for 40 years and everybody thinks that's how it's done basically, lawyer-envy. Your example of needing time tracking for fee estimation illustrates a big part of the problem with time tracking quite well.

I've posted about fee calculation elsewhere in the forums. You can read more of my thoughts on the subject there. Essentially, where you price your fees should NOT be based on your presumed cost. It should be based on the value of what you're providing to your customer.

You should Price on Value, and Manage on Cost. Those are two completely different things. Profit comes out of the interaction of the two, but only if you do both of them right. Frank Stasiowski FAIA wrote a book about this 20 or so years ago, and it's still as good and relevant today as it was then.