Stop being your firm's router.
Start being its CEO.
You started a firm to design, and somewhere past the fifth hire you became a full-time answer machine. Did the fabric ship. Are we profitable on Osprey. Who is free in November. Workroom answers those from the same records your team is already working in — including the ones you currently take to your accountant and wait a week for.
Derived from live budget data — fee, FF&E and expenses. Based on this project, consider raising your average FF&E markup to ~31% on the next one.
You should not need a meeting, an accountant, or a spreadsheet to see this.
Trusted by the studios doing the work
Catch the problem project in week three, not month six
The projects that lose money rarely announce it. A discount given in the first meeting, an allowance quietly specified 30% over, a trade day that ran long — none of them look like anything on their own, and together they are the difference between a good year and a flat one.
Workroom keeps the fee, the product, the trades and the change orders on one project, and the audit at the end tells you which part earned and which part did not — with a suggested rate for the next one rather than a shrug.
- Profitability per project, with the arithmetic shown
- Quoted versus actual on design fee and FF&E
- Best and worst margin by category, so buying gets sharper
- A suggested rate to hit the target margin next time
Project Budget
Live — buckets refresh automatically from product status + timelogs.
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.
Best margin Top 3 categories
Worst margin Top 3 categories
The firm should run without you in the middle of it
Nobody starts a design firm to become its routing layer. The work above took drawings, a procurement schedule, a dozen trades and somebody holding the dates — and none of that needed the principal to be the person who remembered it.
- Answers without asking — the state of a project is a record, not a conversation you have to start. Walter reads across projects, purchase orders, invoices, contacts and time.
- Problems raise themselves — a silent shipment, a lead time that drifted, change orders crossing the budget. You hear about them once, early, from an automation rather than from a client.
- Pricing from evidence — every closed project makes the next proposal sharper, because the audit says what the last one actually cost to deliver.
Know if you can say yes before you say yes
The most expensive word in a design firm is an optimistic yes. Utilization runs across the same tasks and time your team is already logging, so the question “can we take this in November” has an answer that does not depend on anyone's memory of how busy they feel.
Portfolio view puts every project on one timeline — phases, overlaps and the crunch you would otherwise discover in week two.
Team avg 74% · 118h planned
“Thank you so much for putting this together. The level of detail in your responses is really impressive and exactly what we were hoping to see. It’s clear your team took our feedback to heart, and we appreciate that.”
Running the firm, specifically answered
I do not want another dashboard to check.
Good, because the things that matter come to you. Automations raise the exceptions — a shipment gone quiet, change orders crossing the contracted budget, install readiness falling through a band — as an email or a task, once, at the threshold you chose. The portfolio and utilization views are there when you want them, not a daily obligation.
How is this different from asking my bookkeeper?
Your bookkeeper can tell you what the firm did last quarter. They cannot tell you which room on a live project is running over its allowance, or that a vendor's acknowledged date just moved your install. Workroom answers from the operating records rather than the accounting ones — and still syncs to QuickBooks so the books stay right.
Do I have to change how my team works?
Less than you would think. The plan, the products, the purchase orders and the time are things they already track somewhere. What changes is that those stop being four systems that disagree by Thursday.
What does the audit actually tell me?
Total profit and margin on the project, what was quoted against what was actually paid, hours estimated against hours logged by phase, margin by category with the best and worst three, and a suggested rate to hit your target margin on the next one. See it in full →
We run more than one entity. Does that work?
Yes. Each company keeps its own books and its own QuickBooks file while the work still sits on one project record.
Bring the project you are least sure about.
We will set it up on the call — fee, product, trades, change orders — and you can see what it is actually earning while there is still time to act on it.