TL;DR: RIBAJ’s Technology in Practice Survey, in association with Hyphen Digital, surveyed more than 230 UK architecture practices and found most still run finance on spreadsheets, over a third aren’t confident they’re recovering all their fees, and a meaningful share only discover budget overruns after it’s too late.
In a survey conducted by RIBAJ and Hyphen Digital, over 230 UK architecture practices reported that they lack visibility into their own finances. The RIBAJ Technology in Practice Survey 2026 looked at how UK practices actually run their finances and projects. Most are still using spreadsheets, emails, and a manual review of the numbers before invoicing. Whilst these methods work fine at a small scale, they start to fail as practices grow.
Five findings stood out: how practices track costs, whether they trust their own fee recovery, whether they can tell a profitable project from an unprofitable one, how late they find out about overruns, and what’s actually stopping them from investing in something better.
Spreadsheets are still doing the job that accounting and practice management software should be doing
According to the survey findings reported by RIBAJ, the number of practices that use spreadsheets for finance and cost control exceeded the number that use accounting or dedicated project management software. When it comes to tracking time and cost against a live project, spreadsheets are still the most relied-on method, with dedicated project management software second and accounting software third.
None of that means practices are generally behind on technology. The gap isn’t awareness; it’s that a spreadsheet is a document, not a system. It doesn’t flag anything, alert anyone, or update itself when a job manager logs time somewhere else. We’ve written before about why spreadsheets break down at scale once a practice is running more than a handful of jobs at once, and it’s the same story here: fine at five live projects, brutal at fifteen.
If the fix is a proper accounting platform rather than another spreadsheet, it’s worth choosing accounting software for architects that actually connects to how a practice runs projects, not just what it invoices.
Are architecture practices confident they’re recovering all their fees?
Thirty-six per cent of UK architecture practices aren’t confident they’re recovering all the fees they’re owed. Managing out-of-scope cost recovery is the single hardest thing practices report on, scoring 5.2 out of 7 on the survey’s own difficulty scale, well ahead of forecasting fee income or tracking billable hours against budgets.
That’s more than a third of practices admitting they don’t know if they’re being paid what they’re owed. Hyphen Digital founder Josh Probert-Waters, quoted in the original RIBAJ coverage, put it plainly: “You can’t recover what you can’t see. If you can only see what you’re owed after the final invoice has been issued, you’ve lost the capacity to go back and reclaim fees. You need to be able to see your costs and how they track against your original budget and the fee proposal.”
Out-of-scope costs, variations, and additional services are exactly the kind of things that slip through the cracks of a spreadsheet. They get agreed verbally on site, logged in an email thread, or remembered by whoever ran the job, and never make it onto the invoice. The RIBA Business Benchmarking 2025 report found that Partners, Directors, and Sole Principals spend just 46% of their time on billable work. If managing scope creep and variations is already eating into the time available to bill properly, a system that can’t track them automatically compounds the problem. This is where a lot of revenue leakage in architecture practices actually happens, in dozens of small write-offs rather than one big one.
Can architecture practices actually tell if a project was profitable?
The RIBAJ Survey reported that just 41% of practices call it “very easy” to know whether a project was profitable, and 17% say they generally struggle to work it out at all (a mix of 11% who find it fairly difficult and 6% who find it very difficult).
For most practices, working out profitability means going and calculating it, usually after the project’s finished, when there’s nothing left to do about it. A further 42% say they can “piece it together with some effort,” which is a polite way of describing a Friday afternoon spent reconciling three spreadsheets and a Xero export.
RIBA’s head of research, Adrian Malleson, offered a useful diagnosis of why, in the same RIBAJ coverage: “Everyone loves spreadsheets, but there are a lot of risks associated with them. They aren’t databases… there’s a real human impact associated with not recovering fees.” A spreadsheet can hold the numbers. It can’t tell you, unprompted, that a project has slipped into loss. Only something built to track cost against the fee value in real time can catch that while there’s still time to act, and right now, most practices don’t have it.
How do architecture practices find out when a project’s gone over budget?
32% of practices only discover a project is over budget when someone manually reviews it, and 8% don’t find out until after the project has already ended, compared with 22% whose software flags it automatically.
That timing matters more than the raw percentage. A manual review eventually catches the problem, but by the time someone’s sat down to check, the fee proposal’s often long gone, and there’s no invoice left to adjust. 38% of practices said the majority of their projects run over budget or over time, and a further 27% said it happens on a quarter to a half of projects. Combined, that’s more than half of practices running over budget or over time regularly.
Adrian Malleson’s read on this lines up with the spreadsheet finding above. As he put it, projects need an “automated, event-driven method” of monitoring; otherwise, overruns only get caught by chance. Workload visibility plays into this too. It’s hard to spot early that a job’s eating more hours than it was priced for without a clear read on capacity planning for architects, because there’s no baseline to compare against.
Investment is coming, but three things are holding practices back
78% of practices expect their investment in digital tools, including AI, to increase over the next two to three years. Only 1% expect it to decrease. Whatever the frustrations documented above, practices aren’t ignoring the problem. They’re planning to spend money on it.
The reasons the rest are holding back are practical, not from a lack of appetite. 45% cite the cost of the technology itself. 36% point to cash flow or funding, given how many practices are already unsure they’re recovering everything they’re owed. 30% say they lack clarity about what the benefits actually are, a fair criticism of an industry that talks more about features than outcomes.
None of those three barriers gets solved by buying more software. They get solved by knowing, specifically, what a system would recover or save before committing to it.
What does this mean for your practice?
Most UK architecture practices are running busy, viable businesses on tools that were never built to show them, in real time, whether any given project is making money. That’s what happens when a spreadsheet has to do a database’s job, not a reflection on the people running the practice.
Josh Probert-Waters put it simply in the original RIBAJ coverage: “You can’t recover what you can’t see.” That’s the trend running through every finding above: the numbers exist; they’re just not visible enough, quickly enough, to act on.
If you want to talk through where your own practice sits against these numbers, book a discovery call, and we’ll walk through it together.
