The short answer
Billing by phase means the client pays the fee in pieces, each tied to a point in the project. Most studios' first billing systems get this wrong by tying those pieces to the design phases, so finishing schematic design produces an invoice. Real contracts bill on events the client can see: the agreement signed, the plans submitted to the city, the permit ready to issue. So a project has two lists: the design phases the office works through and the fee phases the contract pays on. The system has to let them differ per project, and everything else follows from keeping them apart.
Why fee phases are not design phases
The contract we built a studio's billing system around had five work stages and three payments. The stages were the studio's own, from pre-design to construction administration. The contract paid 20 percent on execution, 50 percent when the plans went to Building and Safety, then 30 percent at ready to issue. That's three invoices across five stages, and none at the end of a design phase. A system built on one invoice per phase would have been wrong on the first job it touched.
The traditional split puts 15 percent on schematic design, 20 on design development, 40 on construction documents, 5 on bidding and 20 on CA. Most fee proposals start from it; use it for that and nothing more. The invoice schedule has to reproduce the signed contract, in its own words. On a residential job, the trigger is often an event in the city's process, not a stage in yours. The client understands "the permit is ready" better than "construction documents are 90 percent complete."
So fee phases live on the contract record, not the project board. Each project has its own number of fee phases and its own triggers, and the task list never carries them. That's why the phases template page keeps the three kinds of phase (task status, design phase, fee phase) in three places.
Writing the invoice schedule
Write the invoice schedule on the day the contract is signed, before any work; it's what remembers the final invoice eighteen months later. It comes from four fields on the contract record: total fee, retainer, number of fee phases and fee type. The fee type is one of three: fixed, a percentage of construction cost or hourly to a cap. The schedule is the retainer invoice plus one invoice per fee phase. Each carries its trigger in the contract's own words: "on submittal to Building and Safety", not "phase 2".
Number invoices in the office's own convention, and make the number carry the project. The studio we built for uses the project number plus a six-digit sequence, so the invoice number alone tells the bookkeeper the job. Set terms on the schedule, not per invoice: that studio bills net 14, and net 30 is the more common default.
Once the fee is known, write amounts as money, not percentages. A 50 percent invoice on a fee that was later amended is an argument; a $4,500 invoice is a fact. The system we built for that studio turned its real $9,000 contract into three invoices of $1,800, $4,500 and $2,700. They matched the signed agreement and the studio's real invoice numbers exactly.
Retainers
A retainer is money paid before work starts and applied to the fee later. The contract decides where it's applied, and the two usual choices are opposites: the first invoice or the final one. Applied to the first invoice, the retainer is the first payment. Held for the final invoice, it's a deposit the studio carries through the job, and the client's last bill is small. The second protects the studio if a job stops early; the first is simpler to explain.
Either way, track the retainer as its own invoice row on the schedule, dated when it arrived. Then the total collected is the sum of the rows, not the rows plus a number someone remembers. Whether a retainer is refundable when a client walks away is a contract clause, not a system setting. The system should show the clause, not decide it.
Percent-complete versus milestone billing
Invoices go out on milestones or on percent complete, and most studios use both on the same job.
| Basis | The invoice goes out when | Cash | Dispute risk | Admin | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Milestone | A contract event fires: execution, submittal, permit ready to issue, substantial completion | Lumpy; nothing between events | Low: the client can see the event happened | Low: the schedule is written once | Fixed-fee residential and small commercial design phases |
| Percent complete | Monthly, for the share of the phase fee earned that month | Steady | Higher: the percentage is the studio's estimate | Monthly estimate per phase, per project | Long phases, hourly work, construction administration, larger projects |
Milestone billing wins on small fixed-fee work, because nobody argues about whether the permit is ready. Percent complete wins when a phase runs for months and the studio cannot carry payroll until the next milestone. That's why construction administration is so often billed monthly, even when design was billed on milestones. Honest percent complete needs an estimate the principal will defend and a record of what's been invoiced per phase, so the system holds both. A studio that bills percent complete without tracking hours has nothing to check its estimate against.
Additional services, reimbursables and discounts
Four line-item types cover an architecture practice: Fee, Reimbursable, Additional Service and Discount. Reimbursables are printing, permit fees advanced, travel and whatever else the contract lists, billed at cost or at cost plus the contract's markup. Additional services are scope the contract excluded. Agree them in writing before the work and bill them on their own line, so the fee lines still reconcile to the schedule.
A discount always subtracts, and the system should never add it to the total. An invoice with a hand-typed total of $1,000, an $800 fee line and a $100 discount recalculates from its lines to $700. The four types map one to one onto QuickBooks line items, so pushing invoices into QuickBooks, covered in the next section, needs no translation.
How to run billing by phase in monday.com
It takes two private boards and one rule. A board is monday.com's word for a shared table, and a private one is visible only to the people you add. The Contracts board holds one row per project's fee agreement: contract total, retainer, number of fee phases, fee type and terms. The Payments board holds one row per invoice. Its subitems, the rows nested under each invoice, are the line items: Fee, Reimbursable, Additional Service or Discount.
A Generate Invoice Schedule action reads the contract and creates the retainer row and the phase rows, with their triggers and numbers. A Recalculate Total button sums the line items with the discount rule applied. Invoice status follows the real lifecycle: scheduled, sent, paid, overdue.
The rule: every dollar amount lives only on the Contracts and Payments boards, subitems included. monday.com Pro sets permissions per board, not per column, so anything on the shared project overview is visible to every employee. The overview shows contract total, retainer, invoiced to date and paid to date through mirror columns. A mirror column pulls a value from another board, and it shows blank to anyone outside the private boards. Columns that link the boards show project and invoice names, never amounts.
Portfolio totals (total contracted, invoiced to date, collected to date, invoices by status) go on a private dashboard. A dashboard widget sums the mirror columns, so the totals live there rather than in a board footer. Private boards start on Pro, at $19 per seat per month billed annually as shown on monday.com/pricing on October 7, 2026.
QuickBooks Online stays the ledger. monday.com has no native QuickBooks Online integration, so invoices go to QuickBooks through a small custom app hosted on monday's own app platform. It matches or creates the customer and pushes the invoice with its line items and terms, using monday's invoice number as the QuickBooks document number. Every five minutes it pulls paid status back. Before the first invoice, settle which system wins when they disagree: QuickBooks owns invoice content and paid status, and monday.com owns the schedule.
The app is custom work, priced into the fixed quote for Full System, which starts at $7,000. The studio authorizes its QuickBooks company once and owns the app afterward.
QuickBooks Online itself costs $38 a month for Simple Start, $85 for Essentials, $140 for Plus and $340 for Advanced. Those are the regular prices on quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing on October 7, 2026, when a 50 percent discount for the first three months was on offer. "Track project profitability" is listed from Plus upward. Most studios are already on one of these plans, so QuickBooks adds no new cost.
Where else billing by phase can live
| Route | Price (October 7, 2026) | What it does | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| A spreadsheet plus QuickBooks Online | QuickBooks from $38 a month; the sheet is free | The schedule in a sheet, the invoices in QuickBooks | The sheet and the ledger drift apart by the second quarter, and nothing reminds anyone of a trigger |
| Monograph | $45 to $490 a month (monograph.com/pricing) | Native invoicing, payments, project accounting and a QuickBooks integration, as named on its site | It is Monograph's model of a fee, and the studio's other records (CA log, consultants) live elsewhere |
| BQE Core | Quote-based (bqe.com) | Billing and invoicing with accounting in the same product | No published price; a full firm-management system, bigger than billing alone needs |
| monday.com, built as above | Pro $19 a seat; Full System from $7,000; QuickBooks app in the fixed quote | Fees by phase on private boards, inside the system that also runs the projects | Accounting stays in QuickBooks, linked by a custom app; utilization on a dashboard we build |
If your real question is hours against fee by phase, Monograph answers it natively, and the monday.com vs Monograph page says so at length. The monday.com build puts the fee schedule next to the project list, the CA log and the pipeline. They all live in the one system the staff already open every day.
Limitations
What stays outside this build
Accounting stays in QuickBooks: the ledger, tax, aged receivables and the books. If the books themselves are the problem, you need a bookkeeper, not a board. Pro sets permissions per board, not per column, so set up the private boards at the start, before fees go on any shared board.
The QuickBooks app is custom code, priced into the build's fixed quote. Until it's connected, monday.com invoices go into QuickBooks by hand. Percent-complete billing is only as honest as the estimate behind it. Nothing here is legal or accounting advice: your contract's payment clauses govern, and the system reproduces them, never writes them.
Questions principals ask
Should an architecture firm bill monthly on percent complete or on milestones?
Milestones suit fixed-fee residential and small commercial work, because the client can see the event and nobody argues about a percentage. Monthly percent complete suits long phases, hourly work and larger projects: it keeps cash flowing and matches the hours going in. Many contracts mix the two, with milestones through the design phases and monthly billing in construction administration.
How do you keep project fees hidden from staff in monday.com?
monday.com Pro sets permissions per board, not per column, so a fee on a shared board is visible to everyone. Every dollar amount lives on two private boards, Contracts and Payments, that only the principal and the bookkeeper belong to. The project overview shows totals through mirror columns, which show blank to non-members, and portfolio totals go on a private dashboard. The fees section of our monday.com guide for architects has the structure.
Can monday.com send invoices to QuickBooks Online?
Yes, through a small custom app that Hawkpoint builds on monday's own app platform, since there's no native connector. It pushes each invoice with its line items and terms, using monday's invoice number as the QuickBooks document number. Every five minutes it pulls paid status back. It's custom work, priced into the fixed quote for Full System (from $7,000), and the studio owns it afterward. The Studio Yona case study describes the one in production.
Key takeaways
- Fee phases are contract payment events, not design phases. Keep the two lists apart and let them differ per project.
- Write the invoice schedule on signing: retainer plus one invoice per fee phase, triggers in the contract's words, invoice numbers that include the project number.
- Track the retainer as its own row, applied where the contract says.
- Milestones for fixed-fee design phases; monthly percent complete where a phase runs long. Four line types: fee, reimbursable, additional service, discount.
- In monday.com, fees sit on private Contracts and Payments boards on Pro. Mirror columns show blank to staff, and totals go on a private dashboard. QuickBooks Online stays the ledger, connected by a custom app.