Increase Your Billable Time with ArchiOffice Project Templates

Time is money, for any business. This is especially true for architects and engineers. When you start a project, you want to get to the tasks that are billable as soon as possible. You don’t want to waste time on administrative busywork, such as entering project details into your project management software. Project templates provide an excellent way to eliminate some of the busy work.

Templates can get you off to a quick start on your projects. Because of their scalability, you can create templates for small or large projects. Templates can increase consistency and reduce time lost correcting errors. In addition, they can free up your time and resources, reduce time spent on non-billable tasks, and get you working on the actual project - billable time - faster.

When starting a new project in ArchiOffice from a template, it will inherit the following information:

• Project Team: Templates can store team member roles, status, and bill rates. In addition, time/expense records’ approval responsibility information- if implemented – can be saved.
• Project Phase and Job Codes: Details on how phases and codes relate to one another and which are active at the startup can be saved in project templates.
• Milestones: These can be easily scheduled for display on the calendar. You can start a project with basic milestones in your template and add or remove them as needed.
• Checklists and Tasks: Many firms handle a variety of projects that vary in scale and length. Templates are an excellent way of managing checklists and tasks that vary by project. Also, when tasks are used properly they have budgeted hours which are set as defaults in a template. These can easily be modified for a new project based on the specifics of that project and the team working on it.
• Billing Options: If many of your projects use a percentage of a construction contract, you can create a template for this specific billing method. All you’ll have to do is punch in the percentage and the current construction value. Also, since the budget is inherited from the template, the phases will be preset to the percentage of the total fee that you want. As with everything, these can be modified once the project is created. If any phases are to be billed hourly, with or without a cap, the project template can have this setup as well.

Your time is money and project template’s scalable and time-saving features make them a valuable tool that should be part of your firm’s practice management best practices.