a back office that doesn’t feel like a spreadsheet
(we would know — we ran one on five of them)
Working Record
We go on like a broken record
about keeping a working one.
One job, all the way through
Every project starts as an email you nearly missed, and ends — if the year has been kind — with money in the account and nothing left open. The part in between is the part nobody writes software for. This is that part.
Not enterprise resource planning one practice, one week at a time
Most practice software stops at the invoice. Most accounting software never knew about the job. This does both — and the gap between them is exactly where the copying used to happen.
Built in an architecture and building-physics practice, for practices shaped like that one. If your week is other people’s projects — stages, hours against them, a fee that comes out of those hours — you will recognise most of it.
so — who are you?
It starts with somebody writing to you
A name, a suburb, and a vague idea about the back of the house. It lands in the same inbox as the insurance renewal and the newsletter you keep meaning to unsubscribe from. Here it lands as an enquiry, with the person already attached, waiting rather than sinking.
It becomes a job with a number on it
The number is yours: 0042, or 2026-0017, or whatever your filing has always looked like. It arrives with the stages you actually use, because you set them once and every new job inherits them. From here on, everything that happens finds its way back to this one job.
Then the weeks happen
Tuesday goes on drawings, Wednesday disappears into a council RFI, and somewhere in there is a site visit and two hours you will never quite account for. You record them by the week, in the shape a week actually has — not as a form you fill in on the last Friday of the month, trying to remember March.
Your client can see it taking shape
They sign in and find their own project: the drawings, the comments on them, the milestones met and the ones not yet. They can book a meeting without the four emails it usually takes. They see their work and nobody else's, and the difference between that and a shared folder is that you are never the one going looking for it.
The invoice is already written
Because the hours are already there. You look at what has been done since you last billed, decide what is fair, and draw the invoice from it — rather than opening a spreadsheet and starting a small act of archaeology. Your letterhead, your ABN, your numbering.
They pay on a page with your name on it
Not a payment processor's page. Yours. They tap a card, the money moves, and the invoice marks itself paid without you touching it — which matters most on the Friday you are on site and not near a desk.
The quarter closes without a shoebox
Expenses and bank lines sit beside the income, on a cash basis, GST inclusive, in the shape the BAS wants. The quarter is a screen you read rather than a weekend you lose. And once a year is lodged, it can be closed — so a stray click on an old tab cannot quietly rewrite 2019.
And the job stays finished
Hours claimed once. An invoice drawn against once. A bank line settling one thing. The database refuses the second attempt rather than trusting anybody to notice — which is the only way a closed job stays closed. Whenever you want it, the whole practice exports as a portable file. No lock-in, and no asking.
the bit nobody else does
You type it once.
A record plays the same thing every time you ask it. That is the whole idea. One fact, typed once, saying the same thing on every screen that reads it — so nothing has to be kept in step, because nothing was ever apart.
below: what you do, and what happened without you
- Somebody writes to youEnquiries
A name, a suburb, a vague idea about the back of the house. It lands where you can see it instead of halfway down an inbox.
…and without you:- It has a number before it has a fee
- The ones that went quiet are still on the list
- It becomes a jobProjects
With your number on it — 0042, or 2026-0017, or whatever your filing has always looked like. Stages, a client, a fee.
…and without you:- The enquiry stops being an enquiry
- The agreed fee arrives from the letter of offer you sent
- You put the week inTimesheets
Tuesday on drawings. Wednesday lost to a council RFI. Half an hour on the phone you would otherwise never have billed.
…and without you:- Work in progress updates as you type
- The job’s fee starts filling up
- Katie’s hours become Katie’s claim
- The invoice is already writtenInvoicing
Because the hours are already there. You look at what has been done since you last billed, and say yes.
…and without you:- Those hours are marked billed — once, and never again
- The statement of hours comes with it
- Your draw against it becomes available
- They pay on your pagePay
Not a payment processor’s page. Yours — your letterhead, your ABN, your bank details.
…and without you:- The invoice marks itself paid
- The money appears as a bank line to reconcile
- The quarter closesFinance
Cash basis, GST inclusive, in the shape the BAS asks for. Expenses and bank lines sitting beside the income.
…and without you:- The BAS figures are already there
- Anything unexplained is a short list, not a shoebox
- The accountant gets a pack, not a question
the twenty minutes nobody writes down
Some of your week never reaches a timesheet
The phone call about the head height of a window. The email with three attachments and a question at the bottom of it. The markup you did while the kettle boiled. Each one too small to be worth opening a spreadsheet for — and none of them on any invoice you have ever sent.
A fortnight. The solid marks made it onto a timesheet.
20 min a day, five days a week, forty-six weeks
≈ 77 hours a year. On a $180 hour, about $13,800 — for one person.
The portal will not remember them for you. What it does is make writing one down take five seconds from the screen you are already on, against the job you are already in — so the twenty minutes is worth recording, which is the only reason anybody ever does.
the fee that quietly became a discount
And some of it you gave away without deciding to
You quoted a fixed fee — sixty hours at a hundred and eighty, call it ten thousand eight hundred. The job took ninety-four. The client was reasonable, the scope crept the way scope does, and nobody did anything wrong. You still earned about a hundred and fifteen an hour.
A worked example, not a survey. Put your own fee and your own hours in and the shape does not change.
The point is not to go back and bill for it. That job is done, and mostly you would not want to. The point is that the next fee should know about it — and it can only know if the hours were written down while they were happening.
charging fairly is mostly just knowing
Fair cuts both ways. A job that came in under is worth knowing about too — it is the one you quote confidently next time, and the one you do not pad. What the portal gives you is not a bigger number. It is a true one.
it’s your practice. this is just where it’s written down.
Have a look at your own
We will set up a portal on its own address, with three years of a sample practice already in it. Nothing to install, and nothing shared with anybody else's.