Das Davor — the project lived in four tools.
Architecture bills in phases — schematic, design development, construction documents — and Sablewood tracked those phases separately from the time and the invoice. “The proposal was in one app, the phase plan in another, time in a third, and the bill in QuickBooks,” says Dana Sable, Principal. “Matching billed work to the actual phase was a monthly puzzle.”
Work-in-progress was invisible until invoicing, so the firm often discovered a phase had gone over only after it had already eaten the margin.
$1,160/month across five tools. Phase-to-invoice matching done by hand each month. WIP overruns found after the fact.
Der Wechsel — one record, phase-aware.
Sablewood built a project record holding the proposal, phases, time, and billing, and migrated active jobs first. Time now logs against the phase it belongs to, and invoices read straight from it.
“The first phase-accurate invoice that generated itself, I stopped doing the monthly puzzle entirely,” Sable says.
Was ersetzt wurde
| Altes Tool | Replaced by Mewayz module | Monatliche Ersparnis |
|---|---|---|
| Proposal tool | Angebote & Kostenvoranschläge | $140 |
| Project / phase tool | Projects & Phases | $320 |
| Zeiterfassung | Time & Billing | $160 |
| QuickBooks Plus | Invoicing & Accounting | $90 |
| Email / CRM tool | CRM & Communications | $130 |
| Alter Stack gesamt | Mewayz Business | save $1,160/mo |
Der Schlüssel – phase-accurate everything.
With proposals, phases, time, and billing on one record, the studio runs by phase:
- Time logs against the specific project phase automatically
- Invoices bill exactly the phase the work belongs to
- WIP and budget-vs-actual are visible live, per phase
- Proposals template from past projects of the same type
When time posts to the phase in real time, a phase creeping over budget shows up immediately — not at invoicing, when it's already lost. Catching it early is the whole margin.
Die neue Normalität — designing with numbers in view.
“We make design decisions with the budget visible now,” Sable says. “The firm got more profitable without anyone working more hours. We just stopped flying blind between phases.”