Project management app for architects

Monday, 8:45. The director opens last week's resourcing spreadsheet on the big screen and walks the job list from the top: the mews house is sitting with the planners, the school hall needs RIBA Stage 4 sections issued Friday, someone has to be in Croydon on Wednesday for a site visit. Names get read out against columns, and two architects nod along, neither of them knowing which of the three copies on the server is actually the live one, and by Thursday none of the three will have been opened again.

Ten live jobs, no two of them at the same stage

A project management app for architects has to work inside exactly that kind of week: a studio of eight carries ten to twenty live jobs, and the whole plan is built backwards from a drawing issue, a dated set at Rev B, logged on the issue sheet, past the director's red pen before it leaves the building. One job is in concept, with the client rewriting the brief every Tuesday, while two more have been asleep in planning for eleven weeks. Another is deep in technical design, drawing the package that goes out for tender, which is where most of the hours actually go, and the last one is on site, with a weekly visit, a report to write up, queries arriving by email, and a snagging list forming at the end.

That mix is what makes scheduling so hard, because fees get quoted per stage, which makes each stage real money, while the week is what people actually have to live inside. A practice this size has no dedicated project manager, so the plan lives in one director's head plus a spreadsheet rebuilt every Monday morning, and within about a day and a half, something in the week has usually already moved past what that spreadsheet says.

Project management software for a small architecture practice

ToDoing's Overview is that spreadsheet, except everyone is looking at the same copy, with rows as people or projects and columns as days. When the planner's comments land on Tuesday afternoon and three jobs re-sequence, you drag the affected tasks onto new days or onto a different person, and the change reaches every screen in under a second, so nobody has to be told twice. The associate's My Week already shows it, because My Week and the Overview grid are the same data seen two ways and cannot drift apart. Anything unfinished simply rolls forward to today by itself on the next working morning, so what's on the board is always what's actually still outstanding, not a plan from two Mondays ago that nobody updated.

Forty drawings behind one Friday issue

Issue dates are the only immovable thing in this calendar, but they live in someone's head, while the forty drawings behind them live on sticky notes across three monitors. In ToDoing a milestone sits on the same calendar as the tasks, in the project's colour, so the Friday Stage 4 issue and the work feeding it read in one glance. Each project also keeps a workplan you can group into named sections, as a list or a board.

The value shows on the Wednesday the structural engineer's markups finally arrive, two days late. You push the door schedules and the coordination tasks, and the hole in front of the issue flag opens up there and then rather than at 4pm on Friday. Dragging the flag only moves the flag: the drawings behind it are a separate set of tasks, so you still decide which of the forty move and which don't. The same logic covers the review nobody ever finds time to schedule, the director's red pen. Put it on the grid as an actual task on an actual day, and it gets planned for like everything else instead of getting squeezed into whatever gap is left, or missed.

The house that wakes up on a Thursday

Approvals come back with no warning: a job asleep for eleven weeks is live again by lunchtime, and the director scans the studio for whoever looks least buried. Park dormant jobs in the Someday column, which holds work with no date, then drag one into a person's week when the decision notice lands, and the grid shows who is genuinely free.

Cover matters more here than in most sectors, because the site visit day is a fixed weekday and someone has to be standing on the scaffold. Leave, on the Pro plan, handles half days, one approver, balances, public holidays by country and region, and a team wall chart. Approved time off reads on the same grid as everything else, so when someone books a day off, whoever is scheduling around them can see it directly instead of hearing about it secondhand. Book the technologist's Friday off in March, for instance, and whoever needs cover for the Friday site visit sees the gap on the grid the same month it's approved, not by text on Thursday night.

Effort capture for studios that hate timesheets

Tracking, on the Enterprise plan, works by confirming the plan rather than running a clock: tick a task done and it logs the time you had planned for it, and one tap adjusts it if the day went sideways. Per project you pick days or hours and set a budget, and a burn bar shows the fee going, while the by-person and by-type report reads on screen or exports to CSV. Feed it a few months of your studio's own completed work and the estimation view builds a median and a p80 per task type from that history, so the next Stage 3 fee gets quoted against real numbers instead of a guess that felt right at the time.

What ToDoing will not do for your practice

This is not practice management, and nobody should sell it to you as such. ToDoing will not do stage-based fee invoicing against a RIBA fee split, generate billable timesheets that feed an invoice, run a fee proposal calculator, or hold your ISO or QA records; that ground belongs to Rapport3, Union Square and Synergy. Document management is much the same story: there is no drawing register here, no transmittals, and no CAD or BIM link, so Dropbox or SharePoint, the issue sheet spreadsheet and, on the bigger jobs, a CDE all carry on doing exactly what they already do. Contract administration paperwork, architect's instructions, certificates and the query log stay exactly where they are too. As a project management app for architects, what it actually replaces is narrower than any of that: the Monday resourcing spreadsheet, and the studio's Trello board.

Common questions from architects

Is ToDoing good for a small architecture practice?

Yes, for roughly three to fifteen people who plan by person and by week. Below three you hardly need a tool. Above twenty, once a practice manager owns resourcing and you need six-month capacity forecasts, look at Float or Resource Guru instead.

Can ToDoing replace our resourcing spreadsheet?

That is the job it was built for, with two differences that matter: the whole studio sees the same board live, and unfinished work moves itself forward. There is no import wizard, so you retype the live jobs once and then you are running.

Does ToDoing track hours for stage invoicing?

No. Tracking measures effort against a project budget so you can see a job burning through its fee, and it exports CSV, but it does not produce invoices and it is not a timesheet system your bookkeeper can bill from. Keep the accounting tool for that.

ToDoing is free for three people and three projects, and the free plan never asks for a card, so the 14-day trial is there whenever you want to open the rest. Prices at the time of writing, July 2026: Pro is $2 per person per month, Enterprise is $6. The thinking behind the week-shaped version of all this is written up in plan the week, not the backlog, if you want the longer argument for why a week beats a backlog for this kind of work.

ToDoing also works for accounting firms, consulting firms, creative agencies, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, pr agencies, recruitment agencies, software studios, video production.