Most A&E firms bill from a percent-complete number that lives in a project manager's head and a ledger that lives in QuickBooks Online. The PM calls Design Development 60% complete, the finance manager keys a lump sum into QBO, and the invoice goes out with no phase detail the client can check against the fee proposal. The client pushes back, and the two of you rebuild the number from timesheets and the fee schedule. You also check last month's invoice. We see that rebuild every month at small firms, and it pushes the invoice past the date the cash was needed.
The 46th annual Deltek Clarity A&E Industry Study, published in 2025, found that 80% of firms remain moderately to completely reliant on manual processes and spreadsheets in accounting and finance. The 2026 edition reports that 29% of firms use Excel as their primary accounting tool. We see the same pattern in practice. Firms plan the fee by phase and log the hours by phase, but finance staff flatten everything into one invoice line when the billing tool has no phase structure.
A&E firms should judge architecture invoicing software against six criteria that a generic invoicing app can't meet:
- Phase budgets: Each phase carries a fixed dollar amount or a percent of the fee, and hours bill against it.
- Percent-complete billing by phase: The invoice bills each phase at its percent complete, so the client can check every line against the fee proposal.
- AIA-style progress billing: The invoice shows progress to date against the contracted fee in the layout design clients expect.
- Timesheet to draft invoice: Confirmed hours flow into a draft invoice with no spreadsheet step in between.
- Two-way QuickBooks Online sync: Invoices and payments stay consistent between the billing tool and the ledger in both directions.
- Published pricing: The vendor lists a price you can compare before you book a sales call.
Pricing is on the list because a quote-only vendor can't be compared on one page, and most of the ERPs here are quote-only. You have to book a sales call or demo before you see a number, so you can't put the fee for the software beside its phase-billing capability when you shortlist. The only dollar figures for the quote-only tools come from third parties, and those figures skew toward larger deployments than a 5-to-50-person A&E firm.
Here is how the ten tools compare on those criteria, with third-party cost estimates where the vendor publishes no price:
Monograph, BQE Core, the two Deltek products, and Unanet AE are built for A&E firms. QuickBooks Online, Xero, Wave, FreshBooks, and Sage Intacct bill a client and leave phase math to you. At a 15-person A&E firm, that means reconciling hours to phase fees by hand every month.
Best overall: Monograph
Monograph is practice management built for A&E firms with 5 to 50 employees, and its billing starts from the phase rather than the invoice. Each project is set up as phases that follow the Architect's Handbook of Professional Practice, from Schematic Design through construction documents and Construction Administration, with a budget assigned to each phase as a fixed dollar amount or a percent of the fee. Timesheet hours land against those phase budgets, so the PM and the controller bill from the same phase budget and hours. Finance no longer has to check the PM's estimate against QuickBooks Online entries after the fact because both teams read one record.
A single project can carry several billing methods:
- Fixed-fee design phases: The team can assign fixed fees to phases such as Schematic Design and Design Development.
- Hourly Construction Administration: The team can bill Construction Administration from recorded hours.
- Consultant pass-through: Finance staff can include consultant charges in the same project.
- Retainer billing: The project can also carry a retainer without moving the billing record elsewhere.
The invoice shows billing progress phase by phase, so the client sees what each charge covers.
Monograph can generate monthly draft invoices that pull in the period's expenses and consultant bills, guard against duplicate drafts, and route each draft to the team for review before it goes out. The AIA-style progress billing workflow runs at the phase level. Monograph doesn't document a G702 form generator.
Phase progress and billing progress sit on one screen in MoneyGantt, Monograph's timeline view. A traditional Gantt chart shows when a phase starts and ends. MoneyGantt adds how much of the phase budget has been spent and how much has been invoiced in the same view, so a phase sitting at 80% of budget and 50% complete shows up before the invoice goes out, while a staffing or scope correction is still possible.
Monograph connects with QuickBooks Online through a two-way sync, so invoices, expenses, consultant bills, and client records stay consistent between the project side and the ledger. Stripe handles client payment collection and subconsultant payouts. Garrison Architects reports a billing cycle twice as fast. Brooks Scarpa Huber reports 25% profit growth. Both are customer-reported outcomes rather than independent benchmarks. Workshop/APD, a 50-person New York practice, runs its business development and delivery on the same phase record.
Monograph serves 16,000+ architects and engineers across 2,000+ firms, and all three co-founders hold architecture degrees, which shows in a data model that starts from phase and fee instead of task and ticket. Monograph connects with QuickBooks Online and Stripe only, so if you close your books in Xero or Sage Intacct you need a different ledger or a different practice layer.
Best ledger to pair with a phase-aware tool: QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online is the ledger most small A&E firms already run, and it's now the only QuickBooks a new firm can buy below Enterprise. Intuit stopped selling new US subscriptions to QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus, Mac Plus, and Enhanced Payroll as of October 1, 2024. Existing subscribers can keep renewing, but support for Desktop 2023 ended May 31, 2026, which cut off bank feeds, Desktop Payroll, Desktop Payments, and security updates for that release. Desktop Enterprise remains on sale, but it's a different product class from what a 12-person firm needs.
QBO runs the general ledger, AP, AR, and the bank feeds a controller closes the month from. It has no concept of a phase. An AIA technology study of 329 members, fielded in late 2020 and early 2021, found that 65% of firms with 5 to 19 employees ran an accounting-only tool such as QuickBooks. In our experience, that's the firm where the PM's percent-complete estimate arrives by email and gets typed into an invoice line. Intuit lists Plus at $140 per month and Advanced at $340, with half-price promotions on both, and Advanced carries 25 users.
Keep QBO as the ledger and put a phase-aware tool in front of it that syncs in both directions. Monograph's two-way sync is built that way. BigTime documents a real-time bidirectional connection with both Online and Desktop, and Harvest and Toggl Track connect natively. Xero, FreshBooks, and Wave have no native ongoing QuickBooks Online sync. FreshBooks and Wave reach it only through Zapier or Make connectors.
Best cloud-first alternative: Xero
Xero's US plans run $27, $59, and $97 per month for Early, Growing, and Established. Those prices follow an October 1, 2026 increase from $25, $55, and $90. Every plan includes unlimited general users, which separates Xero from per-seat tools when a 20-person firm wants everyone submitting expenses.
The limits bite an A&E firm at both ends of the line. Early caps you at 20 invoices and 5 bills, so a firm billing eight projects plus consultant pass-throughs outgrows it in the first month. Project tracking and multi-currency sit on Established only. Employee expense claims require Established as well. Xero also has no ongoing QuickBooks Online sync. Moving in is a one-time conversion through partners such as Q2X and MMC Convert. Jet Convert is another option.
Xero pairs well with several practice tools and not with Monograph. Harvest, Toggl Track, BQE Core, and BigTime on its Premier tier all connect to Xero natively. Monograph connects to QuickBooks Online only. Pick BQE Core or BigTime for the billing layer if you already close your books in Xero, or accept a ledger change to get phase-level billing from Monograph.
Best for integrated project management: Deltek Ajera
Deltek Ajera is the pick for a firm that wants accounting and project management in one database. Ajera’s unified general ledger and payroll share the same database with phase budgets. The controller never syncs anything because the project data and the books are the same records. Standard invoice formats cover Percent Complete and Percent of Construction Cost. Time & Expense is also available, which maps to how a design fee is structured. Custom layouts go through the Client Invoice Designer.
No AIA G702 or G703 format appears in Ajera's documentation. Deltek's article on AIA billing names ComputerEase, rather than Ajera, as the product that produces AIA-conforming bills. The price is unpublished. QuickBooks Online connects only through Workato middleware, which matters less here because Ajera is meant to replace it.
Ajera fits a firm that's ready to move its books off QuickBooks Online and run the ledger, payroll, and phase budgets in one database. A firm that keeps QBO as its ledger loses that advantage, because the two systems then meet through Workato middleware. Get the modules and user count in writing before you sign, because Deltek shares the price only through its sales team.
Best for mid-size firms that want accounting built in: BQE Core
BQE Core keeps the full accounting stack inside the practice tool: general ledger, AP and AR, bank reconciliation, P&L, and balance sheet, so there's no QuickBooks dependency. The product is sold as a Foundations base plus Accounting, CRM, HR, and Payroll modules, with Payroll running federal, state, and local filing through Gusto. Foundations covers time and expense, billing and invoicing, project management, and reporting. BQE Core is the closest A&E-focused competitor to Monograph and the one most firms put side by side with it.
The billing workflow includes these elements:
- Contract templates: Billing runs on 20 standard invoice templates chosen by contract type, with batch billing and billing schedules.
- Percent complete: The percent complete entered on the Projects screen displays on invoices, although manual invoices don't bill from it.
- Retainage calculations: Retainage is native with a maximum limit, and the amount due subtracts applied retainer, discount, and retainage from services, expenses, and taxes.
- Early invoicing: An As of filter lets invoicing start before every timesheet is in.
Batch billing and billing schedules let finance staff draft invoices across projects in one pass instead of building each one by hand.
BQE addresses G702 and G703 through a spreadsheet workaround. BQE provides free Excel and Google Sheets templates modeled on G702 and G703 with line items, work completed, stored materials, retainage, and balance to finish. The company states that they are not official AIA documents for contracts that require licensed forms. Ajera, Vantagepoint, and Unanet AE document no AIA format at all. You issue licensed G702 forms outside any of these systems when your contract calls for them, and use the software for the percent-complete math underneath.
Pricing is quote-only, per user per module, with no free trial and a demo in its place. BQE prices each quote from the modules you need and the number of users who'll log in, and a team member follows up with the number after you ask. BQE Core connects to QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, and MYOB for the firms that keep an outside ledger anyway.
Best free option: Wave
Wave's Starter plan is free and includes unlimited invoices, estimates, bills, and bookkeeping. The paid Pro plan costs $19 per month or $190 per year for new subscriptions. Pro adds automatic bank imports with merging and categorization, receipt scanning, recurring invoices, automated late-payment reminders, and additional users. Starter users upload bank statements manually and work alone.
Free has narrowed since 2024. Wave introduced Starter and Pro in February 2024 for US users, moved legacy businesses to Starter on June 10, 2024, and as of June 1, 2026 collaborators can no longer access Starter accounts, so a two-person firm needs Pro. Card payments cost 2.9% plus $0.60 per transaction on Starter. Pro charges 2.9% with no fixed fee on the first 10 card transactions each month, then $0.60.
Wave bills a client, not a phase. The plan comparison lists no project, phase, or percent-complete billing, so a PM's phase progress has to be turned into invoice lines by hand. There's no QuickBooks Online sync either. Wave doesn't carry over QuickBooks history, so opening balances go in by journal entry, and ongoing connections run through Zapier. The fit is a sole practitioner, which the AIA 2024 Firm Survey counts as 28% of US architecture firms, billing a handful of clients a month with no consultant pass-throughs.
Best for large, multi-disciplinary practices: Deltek Vantagepoint
Deltek Vantagepoint is sized for large firms. Deltek includes a native general ledger and payroll. Its resource management module includes capacity planning and skills search. The product also includes a CRM module and Dela, Deltek's AI layer.
Vantagepoint ships one standard invoice template. Every other format is built from scratch in its template editor. Users can have Vantagepoint calculate retainage into a separate invoice section and bill previously withheld retainage. They can also post retainage-only invoices. No AIA template appears in the documentation or the release notes. QuickBooks Online and BIM 360 connect through Workato middleware rather than native links. Autodesk Construction Cloud does too.
Deltek publishes no pricing information. Buyer-reported contracts on Vendr run $60,000 to $150,000 a year for 30 to 75 users, with implementation adding $40,000 to $120,000, and buyers with straightforward requirements negotiate 10% to 20% off list on multi-year terms. These figures cover deployments far larger than a 20-person firm.
Best for government & compliance-focused firms: Unanet
Unanet AE replaces QuickBooks rather than syncing with it, which is the first fact a controller needs. The ERP runs general ledger, work in progress, revenue recognition, and AR and AP automation. The time-and-expense module allocates overhead and indirect expense automatically. Invoice formats are configurable on the Admin setup screen, with progress billing but no AIA form wording anywhere in the documentation. A December 9, 2025 release added Cost-Plus Fixed Fee functionality for A&E firms.
The compliance reputation belongs to Unanet GovCon, a separate product. GovCon documents fringe, overhead, and G&A rate calculation from the general ledger, Incurred Cost reports, and DCAA configuration. Unanet's own timekeeping brochure cautions that software alone is neither audited nor approved as DCAA compliant. The AE product pages make no FAR or DCAA claim, and the help pages on indirect cost rates don't say which product they cover. Get that scope confirmed in writing before signing if you have federal work.
Pricing is quote-only, and the cloud agreement makes all pricing terms confidential. Confirm the included modules, user count, reporting scope, and government-contract requirements in the written quote before signing.
Best enterprise-grade financial suite: Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct bills percent complete natively inside its Projects module once Project Costing and Billing is switched on. A fixed-fee project can compute percent complete automatically from time worked against planned hours, or from an observed percent the PM enters, and milestone templates bill at defined points or at 100% when no milestones are set. The gap is the phase. No phase billing feature is documented, and task-level percent complete is the closest native mechanism, so you'd model Schematic Design and Design Development as tasks.
AIA-style formatting lives in a separate Construction subscription. Project contract lines there can produce invoice formatting similar to the AIA format, with percent complete, stored materials, retainage changes, change orders, and WIP tracking for over- and underbilling, and 2026 R3 moved enhanced project contract billing into early adopter. Sage doesn't name G702 or G703. The Contracts module is another separate subscription, and its percent-complete billing requires Project Costing and Billing as well.
US pricing is quote-based by module. The UK page gives the only published floor, £1,200 per month for three full users before support and implementation fees. G2 reports most customers pay $9,000 to $35,000 a year, with project accounting adding $3,000 to $10,000 or more, and Vendr puts 10 to 20 users at $20,000 to $50,000 with renewals rising 3% to 8% unless negotiated. Monograph doesn't connect with Intacct. BigTime lists a marketplace connector from $20 per user.
Best simple billing for small practices: FreshBooks
FreshBooks lists Lite at $23, Plus at $43, and Premium at $70 per month, with Select on quote. Annual billing takes 10% off, and every extra team member costs $11 a month. The 30-day trial needs no credit card. Prices rose on March 5, 2026 with at least 30 days' notice to existing customers.
The plan limits are client counts, which is the wrong unit for an A&E firm. Lite allows 5 billable clients and Plus 50, so an A&E firm with 12 active clients lands on Plus at $43 before adding a second user. Invoices are unlimited and customizable on every plan, but the pricing page documents no phase budgets, percent-complete billing, or consultant pass-through. There's no ongoing QuickBooks Online sync either. Easy Switch imports once through MMC Convert, and live connections run through Zapier or Make for invoices and payments.
FreshBooks fits a two-person practice billing hourly with few consultants and no phase progress to show a client. Advanced Payments costs $20 a month on the lower plans and comes included on Select with two team seats. The current promotions, Lite for $1 a month in year one and 80% off Plus and Premium for three months, cut first-year cost, and the listed price applies from year two.
Three tools firms recommend that still leave the phase math to you
Firms on the AIA Community Hub and r/Architects mention three time-tracking and billing tools. None carries a phase budget. Each one is listed below with what it does and the phase math it leaves to you:
- Harvest: Harvest offers a free tier, and Teams costs $9 per seat per month. It focuses on time tracking rather than A&E-specific phase budgeting.
- Toggl Track: Toggl Track focuses on time tracking. Firms that need phase budgets must evaluate a separate billing layer.
- BigTime: BigTime Essentials starts at $20 per user per month. A Sage Intacct marketplace connector also starts at $20 per user.
The cost of staying on a tracker shows up at month end, when the controller still reconciles hours to fees in a spreadsheet because the entries never landed against a phase budget. A tracker leaves that math in the spreadsheet as soon as the PM needs percent complete by phase.
Bill each phase from one record with Monograph
Your choice depends on what your team can afford to re-key. A firm on QuickBooks Online with Wave or FreshBooks in front of it bills a client, then rebuilds phase progress by hand when a client asks what the number means. A firm on Ajera, Vantagepoint, Unanet AE, or Sage Intacct gets native accounting and progress billing with quote-only pricing, from G2's $9,000 to $35,000 a year for Sage Intacct to $60,000 to $150,000 a year for a 30-to-75-user Vantagepoint contract.
Monograph is the architecture invoicing software that sits between those two. The team manages phase budgets, timesheets, and draft invoices from one phase-based record, while the two-way QuickBooks Online sync keeps the ledger consistent. The PM enters percent complete, the controller bills that number, and the client sees it. The price is published, the trial is free, and the product is sized for firms of 5 to 50 employees. At that size, firms pay for ERP depth they never use and still reconcile the gaps in a tracker every month.
Spreadsheets and disconnected time trackers make it hard for staff to see the relationship between project work and firm finances. Request a demo to see how Monograph connects phase budgets, timesheets, and billing on one record.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between invoicing software and practice management software?
Your team uses architecture invoicing software to turn a billable amount into a document and track whether it's paid. Practice management holds the work that produces the amount: phase budgets, hours, staffing, consultant bills, and the pipeline behind next quarter's hours. Harvest and Toggl Track are time tracking with basic invoicing attached. BQE Core, Deltek, and Unanet AE are ERPs with full accounting underneath. Monograph is practice management that stops short of the general ledger and hands that part to QuickBooks Online.
How much should I expect to pay for invoicing software?
Costs run from free to tens of thousands of dollars a year, depending on the tier. Wave is free, and BigTime runs $20 to $45 per user per month. Monograph's published range is $25 to $490 per month paid annually, scaled by employee count. Ajera, Vantagepoint, Unanet AE, and Sage Intacct are quote-only. Budget for implementation and onboarding as well as seats, because the ERPs here quote implementation separately. A February 2026 Zweig Letter article describes a 10-employee firm whose planned NetSuite, BQE Core, Salesforce, and Proposify stack would have cost an estimated $50,000 a year in software fees alone, before anyone was paid to run it.
Can invoicing software integrate with QuickBooks?
Yes, and the direction of the sync matters more than the checkbox. Monograph and BigTime sync both ways. BQE Core connects natively. Harvest and Toggl Track connect natively as well. Deltek products go through Workato middleware. Unanet AE replaces QuickBooks rather than syncing with it. The accounting-only tools rely on third-party connectors. Ask how each billing method maps to QuickBooks Online accounts when one project mixes fixed fee, hourly, and consultant pass-through. Ask what happens when a PM revises percent complete after the invoice has synced. That is where a one-way push breaks. The controller ends up fixing it in QuickBooks by hand.
Do I need separate time tracking software?
No, as long as the tool you pick records hours against the same phase budget it bills from. Monograph, BQE Core, BigTime, Ajera, and Unanet AE all include time entry. Harvest's resource planning is a separate Forecast product, and Toggl's time tracking and project planning are two subscriptions. The test is whether a confirmed timesheet entry lands against a phase budget without someone re-keying it, because that link is what makes the percent complete on the invoice a number you can defend.
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