Parallel — Fee Proposal Input

Parallel Architecture

Fee Proposal — Input Form

① Issuing details

Issuing company

VAT

Issue date

② Client & site

Client name(s)

Client type

Feeds the CDM duties wording

Address line 1 (title & filename)

Address line 2

Address line 3

Postcode

③ Project

Project description / brief (feeds intro — write naturally, it'll be tidied to house style)

Planning reference (if any)

Conservation area?

Listed status (heritage multiplier)

④ Project budget (drives the fee)

This is the estimated construction cost — the cost of the actual building work. The architectural fee is worked out as a percentage of this. Choose Client's estimated budget if you already have a build figure in mind and just type it in; choose Calculate with cost plan tool to build one up from floor areas and building type. The client never sees this number — it only sets the fee behind the scenes.

Client's estimated construction budget (£, ex VAT)

Budget used for fee—

⑤ Scope & stages — pick the RIBA stages, group them into quote blocks

How this works: tick every RIBA work stage this job covers (untick any you're not doing). The quote block box next to each stage decides how stages are grouped on the proposal: stages with the same quote-block name are quoted together as one fee. So if you want Planning and Building Regs charged as two separate fees, give them different block names (the defaults already do this); if you want them as one combined fee, give them the same name. Then press the button below to create the editable detail cards.

Include CDM Principal Designer (separate service)

Press Build / refresh stage details whenever you change the ticks or block names above. Tick the CDM box to add a separate Principal Designer service (it's excluded from the main fee and quoted on its own).

⑥ Stage detail & fees

Type each block's fee straight into its Fee box above — that number is what the client sees. Or set an architectural % below and press Distribute to fill the boxes automatically, then tweak by hand. Either way you can always overtype.

Architectural fee %

Rounding (£)

Tidies the figures Distribute produces to round numbers.

Client-facing rate (£/hr)

The hourly rate you quote (£125). Used only to show "hours covered" in the summary.

Fills each block's fee from construction cost × the % above, split across blocks.

Fee % guidelines & sources

RIBA's fee scales became advisory in 1992 and were withdrawn in 2009 — there is no mandatory scale today. As reference points: the old scale placed individual houses in the top "Class 5" band (~10–17%); current homeowner guides cite roughly 10–14% for residential, 8–12% for new build, 12–15% for extensions. The percentage falls as project value rises and rises with complexity, heritage and high-end specification. Parallel's presets sit lower than the full-service figures because the standard service is streamlined (planning + building regs, not full RIBA 1–7 with contract administration) — for full-service commissions use the RIBA reference band. All presets just fill the % box; always adjust by judgement. Sources: RIBA "How architects calculate fees"; Architecture for London fees guide (2026); HomeOwners Alliance architect fees; bparchitecture RIBA indicative fee-scale graphs.

Fee split by stage (%)

Type a percentage to fix a stage's share — it stays put. Stages left blank show (auto) and share whatever's left so the split always totals 100%. Press ↺ to send a stage back to auto. Defaults: Stage 0 2% · Stage 1 3% · Concept 15% · Planning 35% · Building Regs 40%. The £ figure beside each updates live. Manual-override blocks aren't shown here (their fee is already fixed).

Staged payments (shown to the client)

Default: a deposit on appointment, then each stage's fee on submission, with the deposit held as credit and applied to the final payment. Increase the deposit for small jobs or risky-credit clients. Every line is editable — change a label or amount, or add/remove lines. If you change the fees above, press Rebuild to refresh.

Deposit %

Deposit treatment

Internal notes — optional, never shown to the client

These three are just for your own gut-check and record-keeping. They don't appear anywhere in the proposal and you can leave them blank.

Internal floor rate (£/hr)

The lowest effective rate a job is worth to you. If "Est. hours" is filled, the summary warns when fee ÷ hours drops below this.

Construction-stage support (£/week)

Weekly rate used in the site-supervision wording on the proposal.

Your estimated hours (whole job)

Your gut estimate of total hours. Lets the summary show your real effective rate (fee ÷ hours). Optional — but worth filling, as it's what a future "how accurate were we?" tracker would use.

Why you set the fee where you did (private note)

A reminder to yourself, saved with the job. Never printed. Useful later for remembering why a fee was high or low.

Running totals (live). The per-block fees and grand total below are for your check — the proposal itself is generated from these.

Fee Proposal Summary

What happens next?

Submit POSTs the payload to the shared Apps Script web app, which writes it to Dropbox at …/Parallel Fee Proposals and Documents/<YYMMDD-First Line of Address>/ as a .txt (Dropbox auto-creates the folder). Then tell Cowork "process the new fee proposal submission" to generate the .docx.