How Do You Calculate Fees?
How to calculate an architectural fee
There are only three ways to calculate the fee for an architectural project.
List all the tasks that the project requires, and estimate the time that each task will take. The typical project has over 500 tasks.
Research the fees and profitability of similar past projects, and interpolate the fee for this project. Unfortunately projects are rarely very similar.
Use a fee schedule to look up the value of the project in question.
FeeCalqs uses method #3 - but improves on the typical use of this method.
How FeeCalqs Works
First - Enter data about the project.
You need to know approximate sizes and construction costs. The client should give you this. If you have to determine this yourself, make your assumptions part of the proposal.
You will notice that you can have three different ’Use Groups’. Things are rarely simple. FeeCalqs has the real world covered.
This part of the fee calculation process looks up a fee for each Use Group and calculates the fee for that Use Group. In the next step the total construction cost is divided by the total fee to get the appropriate fee percentage for the total project. Here are the fee tables that FeeCalqs uses.
You now have the project defined.
Next is scope
Second - Establish what is included in your scope of work.
By specifying how much of each phase you plan to provide, you are modifying the fee you developed in the first step. You further define how much engineering you are including. There is also a place to add special considerations.
At this point you have THE FEE.
Last
Third - Check the adequacy of the fee by allocating the fee to each phase as a labor budget.
In this step you can evaluate whether the fee is appropriate for the work you anticipate doing. The allocation is made automatically for you based on your previous entries. To make this budget as realistic as possible you can estimate the percentage participation of each member of your design team.
This becomes your design budget that you monitor your performance with.
Determine an appropriate fee in minutes instead of hours (days?).
The Benefits
FeeCalqs is a workbook of linked spreadsheets that makes it very simple to calculate an architectural fee for just about any project.
Project may be large or small
Project may be any Building Group
Your Scope Of Services may be unique
The Project may be complex - more than one Use Group, or a combination of Project Types (New, Renovation, Remodeling, Addition)
Detrmines a labor budget for design - indispensable for checking adequacy of fee
Based on customizable fee tables
Requires less than an hour to get a realistic fee
Every project is unique.
Now your fee is just as unique.
Fully customizable fee calculations!
Look Interesting?
Find out even more about FeeCalqs by getting the Guide