Where a small practice loses its fee

A fee proposal prices the professional work: measuring, valuing, assessing, advising. It does not price the work around it, because that work is invisible until you count it.

What follows is not a complaint. It is an argument that the invisible hours are measurable and that most of them are avoidable.

The four categories

Rebuilding

Starting each month's valuation from last month's file, checking last month's arithmetic because you no longer trust it, re-entering figures that already exist elsewhere. On a job with a bill of any size this is an hour before any surveying happens.

The tell is a folder containing Valuation 07 v3 final REVISED.xlsx. Every one of those versions cost something to produce.

Reformatting

Producing a certificate that looks like a professional document. Column widths, page breaks, a logo that moves, a total that prints on its own page. On a practice issuing thirty certificates a month this is not a rounding error.

Finding

What was agreed about VO-14. Which retention percentage applies to this package. Whether the client ever confirmed that instruction. The information exists, in an email, and finding it takes eleven minutes and breaks concentration for longer.

Checking

The genuinely necessary category, and the one that gets squeezed. Does retention reconcile, does the variation register agree the valuation, does previously certified match what was actually certified. When the first three categories consume the time, this is what gets skipped, and it is the one that catches errors.

Counting it honestly

For one month, on one job, note the time spent on each category. Most surveyors are surprised twice: by the total, and by how little of it was the professional work they thought they were doing.

A rough shape from a practice running eight to twelve live projects:

Take the middle of those ranges across ten jobs and you have most of a working week each month spent on something no client is paying for and no surveyor trained for.

Which of it is actually avoidable

Not all. Judgement takes as long as it takes, and the checking should take longer, not less.

What is avoidable is the part that exists because information is stored in documents rather than in a structure:

• Re-entering figures that already exist
• Recalculating dates that follow from the contract particulars
• Formatting a document whose content is already determined
• Searching correspondence for decisions that should sit on the record they relate to
• Verifying arithmetic that should not be capable of being wrong

The honest counter-argument

Spreadsheets are not the problem in themselves. They are flexible, universally understood, and a good surveyor can build one that does exactly what a particular job needs.

What they do not do is hold structure across time. The relationship between a bill line, the variations affecting it, the certificates that valued it and the person who changed it last is knowledge that lives in the surveyor, not in the file. That is fine until the surveyor is on holiday, has moved on, or is trying to remember March in November.

That is the specific thing worth changing, and it is a narrower claim than software solving anything on its own.

A reasonable test

Take one live job and one cycle. Count the four categories honestly. Then ask which of those hours you would want back, and what it would take to get them.

If the answer is fewer than two hours, the current arrangement is working and nothing here applies. If it is most of a day, that is a number worth acting on, whatever you act with.