Not the design. The rest of it: the fee proposal written on a Sunday, the stage that quietly overran, the planning officer who has gone quiet again. We tell you which of it is worth handing over, and in what order.
Most practice owners know AI could take some of this off them. What they are missing is someone who will look at their own projects and say which part to hand over first.
Fees are agreed by stage. The work is not. Without something watching recorded time against the fee, a stage overruns quietly and the practice finds out when the project is finished and the money has already gone.
Every trade publication is full of generative design and instant renders. Meanwhile the actual bottleneck is a fee proposal you will write on Sunday and correspondence with a planning officer, and nobody is selling anything for that.
The structural engineer is waiting on the surveyor, the M and E consultant has not seen the latest drawing, and finding out who is holding what up takes an afternoon of chasing.
None of that is a technology problem. It is a question of which job goes first, and that is the bit we do.
None of these touches design. Which of them lands in your plan, and in what order, depends on the work you take, your team, and the systems you already run.
Every enquiry gets a considered reply, including the ones with no budget, no site and no intention of appointing anyone.
Asks about the site, the budget, the planning position and the timescale, and sorts the enquiries worth a conversation from the ones that are not.
Whether you want the project. Some jobs you take for reasons that have nothing to do with the fee.
The last proposal opened, reworked over a weekend, and a previous client's site address found in it on Monday.
Assembles the proposal, the scope by stage and the appointment documents from your own precedents against the project type.
The fee and the scope. What you charge and what you agree to do are the two decisions that determine whether the job works.
Recorded time reviewed at the end of a project, when the overrun is already paid for.
Watches recorded time against the fee for each stage and raises the project that is drifting while there is still something you can do about it.
What to do about it. Absorbing an overrun, renegotiating or changing the scope is a conversation, not an alert.
Time logged on Friday from memory, so the stage tracking above is built on numbers nobody trusts.
Drafts entries from the work that already leaves a trail in your calendar, files and model, for people to confirm rather than reconstruct.
Nobody's time is posted without them accepting it. Invented time makes the fee analysis worse, not better.
Validation requirements checked by hand against each authority's list, then the portal refreshed for weeks.
Assembles the submission against the authority's own validation checklist, flags what is missing before you submit, and tracks the application, consultee responses and determination dates.
The design and access statement, and anything that argues the case. That is the part that wins a permission.
Clients ring for an update because nothing has been heard since the application went in.
Drafts the update from what has actually moved, the planning status, the consultant responses, the drawings issued, on the rhythm you set.
Anything about cost, delay or a design decision. Those are conversations.
An afternoon of chasing to establish which consultant is waiting on which other consultant.
Tracks what each consultant owes against the programme, chases the overdue items, and shows you the actual critical path rather than the one in the original programme.
Resolving a clash between consultants. That needs somebody with authority and judgement.
Issue sheets maintained by hand, and a contractor building from revision C while revision E exists.
Maintains the issue register, distributes to the right list, records receipt, and flags anyone still working from a superseded revision.
What gets issued and when. Releasing information is a decision.
Notes and photographs from a site visit typed up in the evening, or three days later.
Turns the notes and photographs into your inspection report format with the actions extracted and assigned.
Every observation and instruction. What you saw and what you require is professional judgement.
Invoices raised late because working out what has been completed against the fee schedule is a job in itself.
Raises the invoice when a stage completes, against the agreed fee schedule, and runs your reminder sequence on anything unpaid.
Confirming the stage is actually complete before it bills.
Compliance documents assembled at the point somebody asks for them, usually urgently.
Tracks what each project needs, collects it as the work happens, and flags what is outstanding well before it holds anything up.
Every compliance judgement, and the principal designer duties. Those sit with a named person and no automation changes that.
Nobody starts with eleven. A plan usually puts two live in the first month and leaves the rest ranked and waiting, so when you have the appetite for the next one you already know which it is.
Most of the job is joining up the systems you pay for rather than moving you off them. These are the ones we come across most in practice, and we have no affiliation with any of them.
Three steps. You do the talking on the first one, and nothing is committed until you have seen what we found.
No prep, no agenda to fill in. We ask the questions and you walk us through how your week actually runs: the jobs, the tools, the emails you send a dozen times a month.
Recorded and written up, so you never repeat yourself.
We work back through the call and map where your time actually goes. Then we find the automations that suit your tools, your team and your budget, ordered so the biggest time saving comes first.
Back with you within a week.
We walk you through the whole report, recommendation by recommendation, and you decide what to take on first. Most people have their first automation running within a week of that call.
The report is yours to keep either way.
The plan tells you what to build. The dashboard shows you what it is doing once it is built, so you can see what you are getting back without asking us.
Set up when the plan is delivered, at app.fewerhours.com under your business name. No shared login and nothing to install.
Every one we build reports the hours it saved and the work it handled, so the value is a number you can check rather than a promise we made.
The rest of the ranked list sits there waiting. When you have the appetite for the next one, you already know which it is.
This works best where a director still sees every project. There are a few cases where it would waste your time, and those are worth saying out loud.
Fewer Hours exists because too many owners knew AI could help them somewhere and had no way of telling a good idea from a sales pitch. The plan is the boring part done properly: sitting with the real workflow and working out which jobs are worth handing over.
Whoever takes your call is the person who writes your plan. No account manager, no junior doing the analysis, and nobody trying to move you onto a retainer at the end of it.
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them. The first one is a conversation, and nothing about it commits you to the next.
A short chat about how your business runs. If there’s nothing here worth mapping, we’ll say so on the call.
The full job. We map the workflows, score every candidate, and hand over the ranked list and the 30-day plan.
If you’d rather we built the projects than just planned them, we’ll do the ones the audit put first. Anything from a quick win to a full agent build.
If there are fewer than five of you and admin takes about an hour a day, there probably isn’t enough here to be worth mapping, and we’ll say so. If you already know exactly which job you want automated, skip the audit and just ask us to build it. And if your processes only exist in your head, we’ll tell you to go and write them down first.
If yours is not here, ask on the call. It is twenty minutes about how the practice runs, not a pitch.
No. Design is what your clients are buying and it is the one thing on this page we will not go near. Everything we recommend sits around the design: proposals, fee tracking, correspondence, coordination and compliance paperwork. If you want generative design tools, that is a different conversation with a different supplier.
Only to read metadata where that is useful, for example drawing revisions and issue status. Nothing we recommend edits a model. The model is the deliverable and automation has no business changing it.
Against recorded time and an agreed fee, yes, and it is usually the highest-value item on an architecture plan because the money is lost invisibly. The catch is that it needs timesheets to be roughly honest, which is why time capture is often recommended alongside it rather than after it.
That is one of the first things we check. Some of it is the API, some is a feature your system already ships and nobody switched on, and some is email and a shared folder joined up properly. Where your system will not do something, the plan says so rather than pretending.
It can assemble the factual sections, the site description, the policy references, the drawing schedule. The argument for why the scheme should be permitted is the part that wins the application and that is written by an architect.
Every recommendation states what data it touches and where that data ends up. Keeping client and project data inside systems you already control is the default, and anything that would move it somewhere new is flagged, with the alternative, before it reaches the plan.
Usually yes, because a small practice carries the same proposal, planning and coordination load as a larger one with nobody to absorb it. If you run one or two very large projects at a time, there may be less repetition to work with, and we will say so.
The plan lands about two weeks after the call. Most practices have the first automation live within a week of that, because the first one is usually enquiry qualification or stage tracking and neither needs anyone to change system.
The call takes twenty minutes and it is about how the practice runs, not about software. The plan lands about two weeks later.