Architecture Firm | How to Earn €20,000 More per Year

Architecture Firm | Cut Costs Without Cutting Staff

Your schedule is packed, your team works tirelessly, yet your architecture firm struggles to generate healthy margins.
This is the paradox many firms face today: plenty of work, little profitability.

The culprit ? It hides in the small daily tasks that eat up your time without you noticing. Between preparing proposals, managing projects, invoicing, and generating financial reports, your team spends entire weeks away from their core expertise.

Instead of reducing your headcount like many agencies have done recently, there’s a smarter alternative : identify exactly where your time goes and optimize those processes.
A free simulator reveals, in just a few minutes, the hidden savings potential within your organization.

The Real Challenge for Architecture Firms

Is your architecture firm facing increasing financial pressure? You’re not alone.
In 2024, business failures in the construction sector rose by 36% compared to 2019, with architecture firms among the hardest hit.

In response, 21% of agencies have reduced staff, and HR requests have tripled.

Yet the real problem isn’t necessarily your team size, it’s the time lost on low-value administrative work.
Hundreds of hours per year disappear into everyday management, sometimes more than two months of work per employee.

An invisible drain that weighs on profitability without being properly measured.

Administrative Optimization – The Invisible Solution

Rather than laying people off, focus on optimizing your administrative workflows.

Six key areas consume most of your team’s time every day:

• Fee proposals and bids
• Project management
• Invoicing
• Expense reports
• Leave management
• Financial reporting

Digitizing these repetitive processes allows you to retain talent while dramatically reducing costs.

While your competitors downsize and lose expertise, you preserve your know-how and free up time for high-value work.
It’s a winning strategy that turns administrative efficiency into a competitive advantage.

The ROI Simulator | Quantify Your Hidden Losses

OOTI’s ROI Simulator shows you exactly how much time and money you’re losing today.
This free tool calculates your potential savings in minutes, based on your firm’s actual situation.

Drawing on insights from over 800 architecture firms, the simulator analyzes six core areas of your daily operations.
Simply enter your number of employees, active projects, and the time spent on each administrative task, and you’ll instantly get two concrete results:

• Hours you could recover
• Euros you could save annually

A personalized diagnosis that turns invisible losses into tangible numbers.

The 6 Areas Where You’re Losing Money

Here’s where your money evaporates, and how to reclaim it:

1. Opportunities (proposals, bids, competitions)
Cut in half the time spent preparing repetitive documents. Stop recreating proposals from scratch with intelligent templates.

2. Projects (management, budgets, schedules, progress tracking)
Your most time-consuming administrative area can become your biggest source of savings. Centralize everything for smoother control.

3. Invoicing (preparation, sending, validation)
Automate what can be automated to free your team. Creating and tracking invoices shouldn’t be a monthly headache. (Read more about the benefits of automating repetitive tasks.)

4. Expense Reports (validation, tracking)
With a dedicated mobile app, say goodbye to endless back-and-forth and lost receipts. A huge time saver for everyone.

5. Leave Management (vacation, RTT, recovery days)
A simplified process that keeps everyone happy and eliminates endless email chains.

6. Finance (management reports, analysis)
Recover up to three-quarters of the time spent on these tasks. Data updates automatically for real-time profitability insight.

In total, you can recover tens of thousands of euros per year.

A Real-World Example

Let’s take a firm with 20 employees managing 40 active projects.
Each month, they prepare 4 proposals (3 h each), manage 20 projects (2 h each), send 6 invoices (0.4 h each), validate 20 expense reports and 3 leave requests, and produce 4 financial reports.

With a loaded cost of €50/hour, this firm currently spends 41 hours per month on administrative work. By optimizing these processes, they recover over €20,000 per year. Those saved hours allow architects to focus on design, site supervision, and business development.

Every firm has its own savings potential depending on its size and structure.

Take Action with the Simulator

Test the free OOTI ROI Simulator now.
In just 5 minutes, get your personalized report, no commitment required.

More than 6,000 users have already taken the step to optimize their daily management.
Want to go further ? Request a demo to learn how to save even more.

The goal isn’t to cut jobs, it’s to unlock your agency’s hidden potential.
Turn lost time into regained profitability.

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