Okay, so imagine this. The railing is on the site, and it's made as per a wrong drawing. Not completely wrong. Just wrong enough that it no longer meets the wall properly. The fabricator has a drawing from six weeks ago; you did send an updated one, but somewhere between then and now, the updated version never reached him. And, naturally, the sections are already cut. So now it's Tuesday evening, you're at your desk, and you're trying to figure out how to make the thing that's already been made work with the thing you actually designed. Two hours later, you've redrawn the detail, found a way out and sent it back. Two hours of proper design work, except now it's harder than the original because you're designing around a problem you did not create.
And the annoying part: where exactly do those two hours go? They're not in your scope. They're not the fabricator's fault either, when nobody sent him the updated drawing. You could probably make a case for billing the time, but then you would have to find out whose fault it was, put it in writing, explain it to the client and have an awkward conversation with a fabricator you still need on site for the next four months. Suddenly, those two hours of your evening seem like the cheaper option. So you fix it, everyone moves on, and that's it. No invoice. No line item. No record. Just another thing that somehow got done.
And the railing is the easy example because at least you can point at it. Think about everything else that fills up a week in a practice. You're trying to make the structural drawing and MEP drawing agree because they seem to have been designed in a completely different universe. You're presenting everything again because the client's father couldn't make the first meeting, and then again because the sister-in-law has some thoughts. You're on a call between the client and contractor, using the same words but somehow having two completely different conversations. You're calling three fabricators to find out who can actually make the thing you've designed. Or you're making a decision that was technically the client's to make because it's been sitting there for weeks and the site can't wait forever. Nobody added any of this to the scope. Nobody specifically asked for it. It just... happens.
And now things get interesting. Scope is good at describing what you know will happen. Drawings, meetings, submissions, stages, deliverables. You can list those. You can put a number against them. You can agree on them. But so much of the work that keeps a project moving doesn't look like a deliverable at all. It's the five emails that finally get two consultants talking to each other. It's the half-hour call that stops a small misunderstanding from becoming a very expensive site issue. It's figuring out who actually needs to answer a question before everyone starts pointing at each other. You don't finish that work with a shiny new drawing to hand over and say, "There, that's what I did." You just prevented something from becoming a bigger problem. And because nothing tangible came out of it, it's very easy to forget that it was work in the first place.
But here's the thing: usually, nobody is actually doing anything wrong. The engineer is doing their job. The services consultant is doing theirs. The contractor is doing theirs. The client is making decisions, eventually. Everyone can be doing their own bit perfectly reasonably, and the project can still have gaps between all those bits. Somebody has to close those gaps. And more often than not, that somebody is the architect. You're the person looking at the whole thing, so you're also the person who notices when the whole thing isn't quite working. If nobody connects the dots, the project suffers. And if the project suffers, somehow, that tends to come back to you.
Which is why "just write a better scope" sounds like a great answer until you actually try it. How do you write a scope for something you don't know is going to happen? This project had a fabricator working from an old drawing and a family arriving at meetings one person at a time. The next project might have a consultant who disappears for three weeks, a client who changes their mind every other day or a contractor who calls because two drawings don't agree. You can't realistically write all of that into the scope without ending up with a document that's basically a list of every possible disaster. And nobody wants to start a project like that.
So maybe the answer isn't to try to bill every little thing when it happens. Going back to a client eight months later and saying, "Remember that railing? That was two hours of additional design work," might be technically fair, but it isn't exactly a fun conversation. The more useful thing is to look at what keeps happening. One railing isn't much. A few hours sorting out drawings here, another hour fixing something on site there, an unexpected meeting, a couple of calls, a bit of coordination that nobody technically owns. Do that across eight projects for a year and suddenly you're looking at a pretty significant amount of work.
And that's the part worth knowing. You might not be able to predict which problem will land on your desk next Tuesday, but you can start to see how much of this kind of work happens across the practice. If it keeps showing up, it's not really a random inconvenience anymore. It's part of running the project. And if it's part of running the project, it needs to exist somewhere in the economics of the practice. Maybe not as a separate line on the client's invoice, but somewhere in the fee.
The problem is, how much is it? Most practices don't really know. Not because the work isn't happening, but because every time it does, someone just absorbs it and gets on with the next thing. You don't log the hour because you're not going to bill it. Then another hour disappears. Then another. And by the end of the year, you've got this vague feeling that there's a lot of this work happening, but no actual number to prove it.
Projectsmate lets you log time against a project even when that time isn't going to be billed, so those hours have somewhere to go instead of disappearing completely. Over time, you can actually see how much of the practice's time is going into this invisible category. Maybe the number surprises you. Maybe it doesn't. Either way, now you have something you can actually use when you're thinking about fees.
Because this work probably won't ever be in the scope. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the fee.