Two halves of the business. One record they both live on.
The design side runs on one system and the build side runs on another, so what the job actually did only exists after somebody spends a weekend with two exports and a spreadsheet. Workroom holds the fee, the trades, the product and the change orders on the same project — and when it closes, the audit tells you where the money went instead of asking you to reconstruct it.
The project budget, live. FFE, fee and every trade on one screen — because on a design–build job they are one job.
Trusted by the studios doing the work
One record
design fee, product, trades and change orders on the same project
Subs paid right
vendor and trade bills against the job that incurred them
Change orders
revise scope without losing what was originally agreed
Draws & retainers
client funds held, allocated and drawn down without a side ledger
The two-ledger problem
Nobody is lying. The systems just never met.
The design studio tracks fee, hours and product. The construction side tracks contract value, subs, materials and draws. Both are right. Neither knows what the other did, so the only place the job exists whole is in a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds at close-out — three months after the decisions that mattered.
The damage is not the admin. It is that the overage on the framing crew and the discount you gave on the design fee never meet at all — so the next job gets priced on the same instinct that produced this one.
Design fee, hours and product markup on the job
Subcontractor and vendor bills against the same job
Client draws and retainer allocations in one ledger
Change orders that move both halves at once
A post-project audit that shows where it actually went
Live — buckets refresh automatically from product status + timelogs.
ProfitabilityAt risk
Total profit$96,420
Margin14.2%
Total designer cost$582,880
Total paid by client$679,300
Based on this project, consider raising your average FF&E markup to ~31% on future projects to hit a healthier margin.
Derived from live budget data. Paid by client = fee + FF&E + expenses actually collected (paid); designer cost = FF&E cost, expenses, and contractor bills incurred. The gap is cash profit to date; design-fee labor isn’t dollarized, so it flows to profit.
Rate Variance
Supporting detail — what was quoted to the client versus what actually happened, and why, so the next project can be priced correctly. The suggested rate is what you’d need to charge to hit your target margin.
Design FeeOn target
Quoted$48,000$160.00/hr
Actual (paid)$48,000
Delta$00.0%
Suggested rateat target
FF&EUnder target
Quoted$186,400$112.30/sq ft
Actual (paid)$186,400
Margin23%target 30%
Suggested rate$121.40/sq ft
Best margin Top 3 categories
Lighting41%
Rugs32%
Case goods24%
Worst margin Top 3 categories
Seating9%
Tables11%
Millwork12%
One firm drew it, priced it, bought it and built it. The client should never have to know where one ended and the other began.Project by Gruver Cooley
One firm, one promise
The client hired you so there would be nobody to blame
Design–build sells a single point of accountability. That only works if the two halves of your own business can see each other — otherwise you are the seam you promised to remove.
Trades on the schedule, not beside it — Subcontractor dates sit in the same plan as the lead times, so the electrician is booked against when the fixtures actually land rather than when you hoped they would.
Bills that know their job — Every vendor and trade bill is entered against the project it belongs to and syncs to QuickBooks with the job intact, so cost of work is real without a re-code at month end.
Draws without a second ledger — Client funds are held, allocated and drawn down inside the same system that knows what was spent — not tracked separately and reconciled by memory.
Where the margin actually goes
The change order nobody papered
On a design job, scope creep costs you hours. On a design–build job it costs you hours, materials, a trade day and a delivery slot — and it is the one thing most likely to go unbilled, because everyone is on site and the conversation happens standing up.
Workroom flags creep against the contracted budget as it accumulates, and an automation can draft the change order and the client email together the moment approved changes cross a threshold. The paperwork and the conversation happen at the same time, which is the only way either of them happens.
TriggerChange orders vs budgetApproved change orders crossed a share of the contracted budgetTriggerTasksCreate task“Draft the change order and confirm scope with {client-name}”Step
Questions we hear
Design–build, specifically answered
Is Workroom a construction management system?
No, and we would rather say so plainly. Workroom does not do takeoffs, bid levelling or field daily logs. What it does is hold the design fee, the product, the procurement, the trade bills, the client funds and the change orders on one job, so the audit at the end is built from real records rather than a reconstruction. Firms that need heavy construction tooling generally keep it and use Workroom as the record that owns the money and the specification.
Can we track subcontractors and their bills?
Yes. Trades sit in contacts alongside vendors and reps, their bills are entered against the project, and payment can run through Bills on a schedule. Everything syncs to QuickBooks Online with the job attached.
How do client draws work?
Through retainers. Client funds are held as a credit on the client's account, allocated to the project, and drawn down against invoices as work is billed — so the balance you are holding and the balance you have earned are never the same number by accident. Retainers →
We run design and construction as separate entities. Does that work?
Yes. Multi-entity consolidation means each company keeps its own books and its own QuickBooks file while the work still sits on one project record. That is usually the reason firms come to us in the first place.
What about the trades' own schedules?
Trade dates live in the same plan as procurement, so a slipped delivery flags the trade day it undermines. There is no portal for subs today — a designer and receiver portal is on the roadmap — but the schedule that drives them is one schedule.
For firms that do both
Bring a closed job. We will run the audit on it.
Give us a job you have already finished and we will set it up on the call — fee, product, trades, change orders — and the audit will tell you which part of it earned and which part quietly did not.
