Architect Timesheet Template by RIBA Stage

The eight columns a good timesheet needs

A useful architect timesheet template has eight columns: date, person, project, stage, activity, hours, billable flag and notes. With these, every entry can be compared with a stage budget, put on an invoice and used to price the next project.

Most home-made templates have the first three and the hours, and stop there. That is enough to pay staff or count total hours, but not enough to tell whether a stage is over budget or to support a claim for additional fees. The stage and billable columns do most of the work.

Date

The day the work was done, one row per day per activity.

Person

Name or initials, so cost and charge-out rates can be applied later.

Project

Project number and short name from a fixed list.

Stage

RIBA stage 0 to 7, or a code for an additional service or non-project time.

Activity

A short description of the task, specific enough to put on an invoice.

Hours

In decimal hours, to the nearest quarter hour.

Billable

Yes or No: does this time count against a fee or a time-charge invoice?

Notes

Anything a reviewer needs, such as "client requested change" or "rework after consultant input".

Use drop-down lists for project, stage and billable so people pick from a fixed set. Free text in those columns makes the weekly roll-up unreliable.

A template layout you can copy

Set the template up as one long list with one row per entry and the eight columns across the top. A long list is easier to filter, total and check than a grid with one sheet per person or per week.

The example row is illustrative. Add three helper tabs to the same workbook: a project list with project numbers, stage fees and stage hours budgets; a people list with initials and rates; and a code list for stages and non-project time. The drop-downs in the main list should point at these tabs.

Codes for non-project time

Every hour should go somewhere, including hours that are not on a project. A short list of non-project codes shows where the rest of the week goes and makes utilisation measurable.

Keep the list short. Five to eight codes cover most UK practices. If people regularly cannot find the right code, add one; if a code is rarely used, remove it.

1. BID: Marketing and bids.Fee proposals, competitions, frameworks, website and social media.
2. ADM: Practice administration.Finance, IT, HR, office management and internal meetings.
3. CPD: Training and CPD.Courses, reading, internal training and mentoring.
4. QMS: Standards and templates.Office standards, details library, specification templates.
5. LEA: Annual leave.Recorded so capacity planning is accurate.
6. SIC: Sickness and other absence.Kept separate from leave.
7. BH: Bank holidays.Entered in advance for everyone.

For project work beyond the main fee, give each agreed additional service or variation its own code, such as "2412 AS01 Extra planning option", with its own fee or rate. That keeps the stage budget honest and makes the extra work easy to bill. The guide to additional services and variations covers how to price them.

Rolling it up each week

A timesheet only becomes useful when it is totalled. Once a week, roll the entries up by project and stage and compare hours used with each stage budget.

In a spreadsheet, a pivot table on the long list does this in a few clicks: projects and stages down the side, hours as the value, filtered to billable time. Add the stage hours budget from the project tab and calculate the percentage used. Then ask the project lead how complete each live stage is.

Stage budget

Stage 4 fee of £30,000 at a blended £75 per hour gives 400 hours.

Hours to date

The roll-up shows 260 billable hours against Stage 4, which is 65% of budget.

Progress

The project lead estimates the stage is 50% complete.

Signal

Fee used is 15 points ahead of progress. At this rate the stage needs 520 hours, 120 over budget.

Weekly check

Also total hours by person, to spot missing timesheets, and non-project hours by code.

The figures are illustrative. The full method for reading fee burn is in the guide to tracking time against RIBA stages, and the roll-up is the main input to a weekly project review.

When a template stops being enough

A spreadsheet template works well for a small team with a handful of projects. It stops working when the effort of keeping it accurate is greater than the value of what it tells you.

• ✓Chasing missing timesheets takes someone more than an hour a week.
• ✓The roll-up is done monthly instead of weekly because it takes too long.
• ✓People type project names by hand and the totals do not match.
• ✓Invoices are prepared by copying totals into the accounting package.
• ✓Project leads cannot see their stage budget when they log time.

If two or more of these are true, it is time to look at software. The guide for small practices sets out what to look for.

Questions practices ask

Short answers to the questions practices ask most often about timesheet templates.

What should an architect timesheet template include?

Eight columns: date, person, project, RIBA stage, activity, hours, a billable flag and notes. Project, stage and billable should use drop-down lists so entries can be totalled reliably by project and stage each week.

Should timesheets be coded to RIBA stages?

Yes. UK architects' fees are usually agreed and invoiced by stage, so coding time to the stage it belongs to is the only way to compare hours used with each stage fee while the stage is still running.

How should architects record non-project time?

Use a short list of non-project codes, such as marketing and bids, practice administration, training, standards, annual leave, sickness and bank holidays. Recording every hour makes utilisation and capacity planning accurate.

Is a spreadsheet good enough for architect timesheets?

For a small team with a few projects, a well-structured spreadsheet with drop-down lists and a weekly pivot table works. It becomes hard to keep accurate as headcount and live projects grow, and it does not handle approvals, reminders or invoicing.

How often should architects fill in timesheets?

Daily is best, because a week rebuilt from memory on Friday is mostly estimates. Weekly approval by the project lead then catches miscoded time before it reaches an invoice.

Where Avoice fits

Avoice replaces the template with timesheets that already know the project, the stage and the work, so the team confirms entries instead of typing them.

In Avoice time tracking, hours are suggested from the documents, tasks and project activity people have been working on, coded to the right project and stage, and split into billable and non-billable time. Approvals and reminders replace chasing, and hours roll up against each fee stage automatically, so the weekly roll-up is already done. Approved time becomes an invoice in one click and syncs with Xero or QuickBooks, and financials show fee used against progress for each stage.

Before committing, agree the timesheet migration scope, responsibilities, timescale and any costs with Avoice. To see it with your own project, book a demo.