For architects and engineers
Billing at the end of a stage is lending your work to the client
Look at the gaps, not the milestones
Stages mark design deliverables. They were never meant to mark the points at which a practice needs cash, and the profession’s own guidance calls treating them as a fee schedule the most common billing mistake small practices make.
Billing at the end of each stage
Concept
15%
Planning
20%
Technical design
35%
Construction
30%
14 months of work, four payments. The longest stage runs a third of a year before you invoice for any of it.
The same fee, taken monthly
Same total, same stages, same sign-offs — invoiced every month across the programme instead of in four lumps. Packaged does either, and this is the one the profession actually recommends.
What that costs in practice
A stalled project holds your fee with it
Planning takes longer than anyone said. A client goes quiet for two months deciding something. The stage does not complete, so the invoice does not go, and work you finished in March is still unpaid in June.
Sign-off happens in conversation and lives nowhere
A client approves a scheme on a call. Two months later the brief has moved and nobody can point to what was agreed, or when — which is a fee conversation you will lose by not having a record.
Stages are how the work is organised. They are a poor way to be paid.
Keep the stages — they are how the profession works, how a client understands progress and how approvals happen. Change only when the money moves. A fee taken monthly across the same programme reaches you as the costs do, and a project that stalls stops being a hole in your year.
What changes
Bill monthly across the programme, or at stage ends
Both are a few settings. A retainer across the project life keeps income level and matches when costs are actually incurred; stage billing pays in lumps against completed work. You are not locked into whichever one you set up first, and you can run different projects differently.
A stage completes on evidence, not on memory
Attach the drawings, the schedule, the report to the stage they belong to. When every piece is delivered, the stage is flagged ready to bill — and you press the button. Nothing invoices itself behind your back.
The client signs off in a place that keeps the record
Approval happens in their portal against the actual deliverable, with the date attached. When somebody asks in month nine what was agreed in month three, the answer is a link rather than a search through email.
Dates that slip get chased before they cost you
Milestones carry target dates, and reminders go out against them. A stage drifting by three weeks is a cash flow problem you would rather find in week one than at the end of the quarter.
What it costs
Ten dollars a month for a sole practitioner, nineteen for a small practice, and the pricing page converts that to your own currency. There is a free plan with one client that does not expire, so you can run one live project through it first.
Clients pay by card, bank transfer or mobile money, into your own payment account. We never touch your money and take no cut of it.
See whether it fits
Two minutes of questions, and an honest answer about whether Packaged suits how you work — including when it does not. No card needed.