What is the standard architecture firm workflow from proposal to closeout?

The eleven stages at a glance

Every US architect learns five design and construction phases from the standard owner-architect agreement: schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding and construction. Those are the middle of the workflow, not the whole of it. A small firm's project starts four stages earlier, at the inquiry, and ends with closeout. Plan check, the stage where most small firms lose the most time, is not a phase in the agreement at all. So the working list has eleven stages.

Stage 1 Inquiry

An inquiry arrives by phone, by referral or through the website form. Write it down as a row straight away: contact, address, scope in a sentence, who the client is, a rough fee estimate and a decision date. Who the client is matters more than it looks. On a residential job the client is often a contractor working for the property owner, and the contractor signs the contract. So the row carries both parties from the start, and nobody has to guess later.

Qualify the inquiry on four things: the site and its jurisdiction, the budget, the timeline and whether the studio wants the work. The stage ends with a go or no-go inside a week. Studios lose time when inquiries sit in the principal's inbox for two weeks because they have no other home.

Stage 2 Proposal

A proposal covers scope by phase, the fee and its basis (fixed, a percentage of construction cost or hourly to a cap), exclusions, a schedule and the terms. Write it from a template at this year's rates. The document is a PDF in the studio's own format, and the inquiry's row carries the estimate and a status: sent, won or lost.

The stage ends when the proposal is sent and a follow-up date is set. Studios lose time when they write proposals by editing the last one, which is how last year's fee reaches this year's client. They also lose it when nobody can say how many proposals are out or what they add up to. Tracking the pipeline as a group on the project list, not in a separate CRM, answers that in one view. The proposal pipeline section of the guide to monday.com for architecture firms has the setup.

Stage 3 Contract

The agreement is signed, the retainer invoiced and the fee phases recorded with the event that triggers each one, in the contract's own words. Fee phases are not the design phases: the contract we built a system around had five work stages and three payments. Its payments were 20 percent on execution, 50 percent on submittal to Building and Safety and 30 percent at ready to issue. The money side is on the billing by phase page.

The stage ends when the project gets its own board and its number, issued by a rule and never reissued. That board, a shared table of the project's tasks, comes from the studio's template, with the jurisdiction's submittal path on it. Studios lose time when a proposal is "accepted" by email and work starts without a signature or a retainer. That's how a studio ends up in design development on a job with no contract.

Stage 4 Pre-design

Pre-design gathers what the design will stand on. That means the parcel number and zoning, the survey, the soils report where needed, the program, the consultants engaged and the jurisdiction's submittal path. Small firms identify that last item late. A City of Los Angeles job, an LA County job and a job elsewhere in California have three different paths, with different submittal groups and clearances. The project board should carry the right one from this stage.

The documents are the program and the site analysis, filed on the project row. Studios lose time when the parcel number and zoning exist in nobody's system, which is the normal state. At the last studio we built for, both were empty on every one of 78 projects, because no earlier tool had given them a home.

Stage 5 Schematic design

The concept becomes a schematic set: plans, sections, elevations and a preliminary opinion of cost. This stage is as much decisions as drawings. Every client decision gets a date, because the question in dispute six months later is always "when did we agree that." The stage ends with the client's approval of the SD set in writing and, where the contract ties a payment to it, the SD fee invoice. Studios lose time when approval is verbal and the fee invoice waits for someone to remember it.

Stage 6 Design development

The studio coordinates structure, MEP and civil with the consultants, settles materials and systems, then issues the DD set. Consultant coordination decides the schedule here, and a waiting-on column earns its keep. Each task waiting on the engineer is marked "consultant" and linked to the engineer's contact, so "what are we waiting on structural for, across every job" is one filter. The stage ends with the DD set and the consultant drawings coordinated, plus the DD fee invoice where there is one. Studios lose time chasing undated consultant deliverables from memory.

Stage 7 Construction documents

The studio produces drawings and specifications, the consultant sets come in and the permit application package comes together. That package holds forms, fees, the energy compliance documents, the structural calculations and whatever else the jurisdiction lists. The document is the CD set issued for plan check or for bid.

Studios lose time in the last ten percent, when the drawing list is in someone's head and nobody can say which sheets are done. They lose it again at the handoff to plan check, when the package is assembled the day before submittal from a checklist nobody wrote down. Keep the drawing list and the application checklist as tasks on the project board, so anyone can read the set's status without opening it.

Stage 8 Plan check and permits

The studio submits the set, and the city returns corrections. The studio responds, resubmits and collects the departmental clearances until the permit is ready to issue. From the submittal onward, the project runs on the plan checker's clock. So every submittal, correction and resubmittal is its own row with a date out, an owner and a status, on a log separate from the project tasks.

In Los Angeles the permit sits on top of three to twelve departmental approvals, listed on a Clearance Summary Worksheet the city issues at the first round of corrections. Each approval is tracked as its own item under its agency. The stage ends at ready to issue, which in most contracts also triggers a fee invoice. Studios lose time in the corrections loop, when a resubmittal waits on a consultant's revised sheet nobody logged or a clearance nobody listed. The CA log page covers the log, and the phases template page covers the jurisdiction groups.

Stage 9 Bidding

Where the studio runs the bid, the bid set goes to the bidders, questions become addenda, the bids are reviewed and a recommendation goes to the client. The documents are the addenda and the recommendation, and the stage ends with the construction contract awarded. On many residential jobs the client has a contractor from the start, so this stage is skipped. Studios lose time when addenda go out by email unlogged, so the record of what the bidders were told is incomplete at the first dispute. Treat each addendum as a row on the submittals log: a date out, a party, a status.

Stage 10 Construction administration

Construction administration is the longest stage and, in a small firm, the one with the least structure. The contractor sends RFIs and submittals, and the studio reviews and responds, issuing change orders where the scope moves. The studio also reviews pay applications and makes and records site visits. Every RFI, submittal and change order is a row on one log with the project, the contractor's number for it, the date in and the owner. Each row also has the contract's due date, a status and a waiting-on value, and a rule creates a follow-up task after seven days of silence.

The documents are the log, the site visit reports and the certificates for payment, and the stage ends at substantial completion. Studios lose time when RFIs live in email threads only one person can find. They lose it again when a turnaround the contract sets is missed because nobody counted the days.

Stage 11 Closeout

The punch list is walked and completed, record drawings and the closeout documents are delivered and the final pay application is reviewed. The final invoice goes out, and the stage ends when it's paid and the project row moves to closed. Never delete the row: the numbering rule checks it so no number is reused, and the project list is the studio's history. Studios lose time on the final invoice, because after a long CA stage nobody is thinking about it at substantial completion. The invoice schedule built at the contract stage remembers it.

Where studios lose time

Four handoffs account for most of the delay we see when we read a studio's old system, and none of them is a design problem.

How to put the workflow on one system

Four records carry the eleven stages. The project list has one row per project, with a stage column and a separate design-phase column set by a person. The stage column groups the eleven stages into the five the office filters on: pipeline, active, plan check, construction administration and closeout.

A board per project, made from a template, holds the tasks for stages 4 to 11 as groups, with milestones kept as tasks. Creating the board drops the submittal groups of other jurisdictions. A separate log holds every submittal, RFI, change order and addendum from stage 8 onward, with the seven-day follow-up. Fees sit on a private record keyed to the project number, with the invoice schedule written at stage 3 and each invoice tied to the event that triggers it.

We build that on monday.com, as the guide to setting up monday.com for an architecture firm describes. It has an overview board, a board per project, a submissions board and private contracts and payments boards. Each project board comes from a 99-task template that leaves 54 tasks on a City of Los Angeles job, 64 on an LA County job and 49 elsewhere in California. The case study shows it built for Studio Yona, a seven-person Los Angeles studio.

For a studio with under ten live projects, a spreadsheet holds all four records. Asana or ClickUp holds the first three for a studio that keeps fees elsewhere. The software comparison says which tool carries which stage. The discipline of writing the row down at stage 1 and updating it every Monday comes from people, and the project management page covers it.

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