Schedules, timecards, and fee billing on a single ledger.
Overhead is practice management and project accounting built specifically for architecture firms. Track phase budgets against real-time labor, document third-party schedule delays, and bill fees the way architectural contracts are actually written.
Currently onboarding a small cohort of firms. Already have an account? Sign in.
Engineered by a practicing architect to replace the three disconnected files most firms stitch together.
Fixed-fee phases, pass-through consultant markups, retainer application, AHJ review delays, and 11×17 printable owner schedules are native to the data model—not workarounds.
Three systems that never reconcile.
Most practices manage million-dollar fee budgets across disconnected spreadsheets and generic accounting tools that don't speak the language of architecture.
The schedule
Lives in a complex Gantt chart that only one PM updates, or gets manually redrawn in Illustrator or Excel the night before every owner meeting.
The hours
Entered from memory on Friday afternoon—or Monday morning after accounting asks twice—disconnected from the phase budgets they are burning down.
The fee
Tracked in a general-purpose accounting suite built for generic service businesses, incapable of separating gross contract value from net architectural fee.
Overhead unifies the project ledger. The hours a designer logs on Tuesday immediately update the phase burn rate, populate the draft invoice, and inform firm-wide capacity across the master schedule.
System Architecture
Five integrated modules organized around how a practice actually operates.
Business Development & Contracts
A pursuit-to-contract workflow that carries fee, scope, and team data forward into the project ledger.
- Fee proposal builder: Compose phase-by-phase fee proposals on firm letterhead with a live print preview beside the editor. An accepted proposal generates the project—phases, fees, and team—without re-entry.
- Verified electronic signature: Clients sign through a private emailed link with one-time code verification—no account required. Each signed PDF carries a signature record of the verified email, timestamps, IP address, and a document fingerprint that exposes any later alteration.
- Original agreement library: Owner–Architect (full and short form), Architect–Consultant, Study & Planning, Design-Builder–Architect, Teaming, Electronic File Release, and Mutual Confidentiality templates, auto-populated from project data. Original drafting, not AIA forms, and each version is locked from sending until your attorney's review is recorded.
- Additional services control: Log, price, and record owner approval for every change in scope. Approved changes update contract value across invoices, budgets, and reports, and unpriced requests surface until someone acts on them.
- SF330 assembly: Build the Standard Form 330 (Rev. 7/2021) section by section from your project portfolio, staff résumés, and timesheet history. Part II discipline counts, experience categories, and revenue index are calculated from firm data.
- Credential management: Staff résumés and professional registrations tracked by jurisdiction, with license expirations flagged 60 days in advance.
Time & Expense
Low-friction timekeeping that gives staff immediate visibility into their week.
- Fast project lookup: Weekly timecards with instant search by project number or name across hundreds of active jobs and phases.
- Pay-period aware: Clear indicators for the current pay period week, with direct calendar navigation to historical or future weeks.
- Explicit utilization & overtime: Real-time gauges comparing logged hours against standard weekly targets, with overtime calculated and stated clearly.
- Configurable approvals: Route timesheets to Project Managers for review, or enable firm-wide auto-submit and auto-approve settings.
- Integrated PTO ledger: Request and track leave directly from the timecard, with real-time balances showing hours earned, taken, scheduled, and projected through year-end.
- Mobile receipt & mileage capture: Log reimbursable expenses and mileage from a phone browser. Mileage entries automatically lock in the IRS rate effective on the date of travel.
Project & Schedule Management
Phase-based scheduling built around submittals, permits, and consultants—not generic task lists.
- Calendar-aware phase planning: Build schedules defined by architectural phases, milestones, and working durations that automatically respect your firm's workweek and holiday calendar.
- Delay attribution by party: Explicitly log and categorize schedule slippage caused by Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) review or Owner hold-ups, creating a clear, defensible record of timeline impacts.
- 11×17 graphic output: Generate clean, branded 11×17 PDF schedules straight from the live data—formatted to hand across the table at an OAC meeting.
- Firm-wide Master Schedule: View every active project on a single timeline split between Design and Construction Administration, with prospective projects hatched and weighted in the background.
- Weekly resource allocation: A clear staffing board displaying one row per team member and one column per day to coordinate weekly deliverables.
- Team availability calendar: Click-and-drag leave booking that shows project managers who is out of the office while keeping personal details private.
Fee Billing & Receivables
Project accounting that understands the difference between gross contract value and net architectural fee.
- Net vs. Gross fee separation: Track the total contract sum including structural, MEP, and civil consultants, while defaulting internal reporting and burn rates to your net architectural fee.
- Contract-faithful invoicing: Bill by fixed-fee percent complete, hourly by phase, hourly to a cap, or lump sum, with proper handling for retainers and reimbursables.
- Project-specific rate tables: Bind named billing rate schedules to individual projects by role, preserving historical rate structures across multi-year contracts.
- Strict WIP accountability: Every hourly invoice line item links directly to its underlying timesheet entries. If you adjust or remove a line during billing review, Overhead requires an explicit decision to either hold the time in Work-in-Progress (WIP) or write it off—nothing silently disappears.
- Receivables & aging: Record full or partial payments as they arrive. Outstanding balances remain in accounts receivable and age accurately from the invoice due date.
- Direct PDF invoicing: Issue branded, print-ready PDF invoices directly via email, with immediate red-line alerts on projects trending over budget.
Practice & Capacity Management
Executive visibility for principals without exposing sensitive payroll data to the studio.
- Probability-weighted pipeline: Track prospective fees and estimated start dates weighted by win probability to forecast revenue and labor demand before contracts are signed.
- Role-based capacity forecasting: Project staffing surpluses and bottlenecks by role across future months, combining committed active phases with weighted prospects.
- Custom practice reporting: Review the Master Project List with real-time fee budgets, labor spent, percent complete, and hours remaining. Save custom report views for monthly partner meetings.
- Granular role permissions: Assign access levels from Designer to Principal. Labor cost rates and firm financial metrics remain strictly hidden from non-principals.
- Configurable workspaces: Personalized dashboards built from modular widgets tailored to each user's role.
- Enterprise-grade security: Enforceable two-factor authentication (2FA) and immutable audit logs on sensitive billing and project records.
Consent-Gated AI
Disabled at the firm level by default. Activated only by a partner or administrator.
No data leaves the application until your firm opts in, and thereafter only when a user initiates an AI action. Every feature has an independent toggle and a plain-language disclosure of exactly what it transmits. The model proposes, application logic validates, and a person commits—AI output is never saved automatically.
- Consultant bill extractionParses invoice number, date, and amount from consultant PDFs, flagging probable duplicates, unmatched consultants, and amounts exceeding remaining contract value.
- Receipt captureExtracts date, amount, and description from a receipt photo.
- Pre-issue invoice reviewDeterministic checks for phases billed beyond fee, billing outpacing hours, and omitted consultant bills run without AI. With AI enabled, the work description is also reviewed against the line items.
- Collections draftingDrafts reminder wording. Invoice numbers, amounts, and dates are inserted by the application, never generated by the model.
- Percent-complete recommendationsPhase-level suggestions with a stated rationale, applied only on confirmation.
- Document-to-data conversionReads fee proposals to configure new projects and rebuilds schedules from PDFs, with every extracted line presented for verification.
- Natural-language reportingQuestions are mapped to one of eight fixed reports run under the user's own permissions. The model never queries the database directly.
- Timesheet note cleanupRewrites entry notes into clear sentences, subject to user acceptance.
Single-Entry Integrity
Trace a single time entry from the studio floor to the partners' financial report without manual re-entry.
Logged
A project designer logs 4.0 hours to Construction Documents on Project 2418.
Reviewed
The Project Architect approves the weekly timecard (or firm rules auto-approve upon submission).
Valued & Billed
The hours flow into the draft invoice at the specific billing rate assigned to that role on Project 2418's rate table, linked directly to the phase line item.
Reconciled
The client remits payment. Partial payments automatically update the open balance and age from the original due date.
Reported
Those same 4.0 hours simultaneously decrement the remaining phase budget, update earned-value metrics on the Master Project List, and adjust future studio capacity. Nothing is exported or retyped.
Strict Tenant Isolation & Data Ownership
Every firm's records are isolated at the PostgreSQL database layer via row-level security—not merely filtered in the user interface. You maintain full custody of your project history, can export your raw data at any time, and take everything with you if you ever leave.
Built Inside a Working Practice
Overhead was created by a licensed architect who grew tired of reconciling schedules, timesheets, and fee budgets across three incompatible programs every Friday.
It is developed and stress-tested inside an active architectural practice against real multi-year contracts, complex consultant structures, and the exact financial questions principals ask on a Monday morning. Features aren't built for a marketing checklist—they are built when the practice needs them, and they have to hold up in production first.
Charles Pifer, Architect
Creator of Make Corrections (submittal review software for construction administration)
Technical & Operational FAQ
Direct answers on how Overhead fits into your existing practice infrastructure—including what it intentionally doesn't do yet.
Who is Overhead designed for?
Architecture firms of roughly 5 to 50 people that bill by phase and want project scheduling, timekeeping, and fee accounting in a single system. The software is structured around standard architectural practice: phases, consultant pass-throughs, retainers, and construction administration.
Does it replace our general ledger or CPA?
No. Overhead is a project accounting and practice management system. It manages the operational side of your revenue: time, reimbursable expenses, fee budgets, WIP, invoicing, and accounts receivable. General ledger accounting, payroll processing, and tax preparation remain with your bookkeeper and your firm's accounting software.
Does it integrate with QuickBooks?
Yes, by file. Overhead generates invoice exports formatted for QuickBooks Desktop (IIF) or QuickBooks Online (CSV), checked against your own QuickBooks customer, item, and account lists before the file is made. Direct sync is on our development roadmap.
Are the agreements AIA documents?
No. They're Overhead's own original templates, written to cover the same issues, and filled in from the project. They're starting drafts, not legal advice: Overhead won't send one for signature until your firm confirms its attorney has reviewed that version.
Is online signing legally binding?
Electronic signatures are generally treated like ink under federal and state law when the record is kept properly. Each signed proposal or agreement ends with a record of who signed, the email address confirmed by code, the time, and a fingerprint that shows whether the document was changed afterward. Ask your attorney about your own contracts.
Can clients pay invoices online through the platform?
Not yet. Invoices are issued directly from Overhead as branded PDFs via email, and payments are logged against open receivables as checks, wires, or ACH transfers arrive.
Is there a mobile app to install?
Nothing to install. Overhead is a responsive web application that runs natively in any mobile browser. The mobile interface is specifically optimized for field tasks like photographing reimbursable receipts and logging mileage on the go.
How is pricing structured?
We are currently onboarding a select group of firms and establishing long-term pricing directly with early partners. Reach out for a walkthrough and we will scope it to your firm's headcount and workflow.
How is our firm's data secured?
Application infrastructure is hosted on Vercel with database storage managed via Supabase in US-based data centers. Each firm's data is segregated at the database level, internal access is governed by strict role-based permissions, and firm-wide two-factor authentication (2FA) is supported. Full details are available in our Privacy Policy.
Does Overhead use AI, and do you train on our data?
AI is optional and off by default. Nothing is sent to an AI provider until a principal turns it on for the firm, and then only when someone presses an AI button—for example, to read a consultant's bill or a receipt. Your firm's project data, financials, and schedules are never used to train AI models.
What does onboarding and migration look like?
You don't need to migrate years of closed archives. Most firms start by loading active projects, current staff, and standard rate tables—allowing legacy projects to close out in their previous system. We handle initial configuration with you directly during your onboarding call.
See a project move from schedule to paid invoice.
A 30-minute technical walkthrough using a live demo practice: building a phase schedule, reviewing a week of timecards, and generating a fee invoice from WIP to payment.
Overhead is project management and project accounting software. It is not accounting, tax, payroll or legal advice. Agreement templates are drafts for your attorney's review, and your firm remains responsible for the proposals, agreements, invoices, timesheets and schedules it issues.