Architecture Firms Editing and Proofreading Services

A client receives an invoice for "additional services: three rounds of design revisions beyond the agreed scope" and is genuinely surprised, because the original fee proposal said the firm would provide "design development services" and nothing in that phrase told the client that revision was capped at a specific number of rounds. The firm is not wrong that the work happened. The client is not wrong that they never agreed to a cap they were never shown. Both are reading the same fee proposal and finding it silent on exactly the point that just cost several thousand dollars.

We edit what architecture firms produce to define the scope of a design engagement — fee proposals and phase deliverable definitions, additional services trigger disclosures, scope boundary and revision limit documentation, and the correspondence explaining why a specific request falls outside the original agreement. Our editors work on the sentence that has to say where included work actually stops.

The disclosed scope boundary is what a fee proposal actually needs to state, and its failure is a phase description broad enough to mean anything a client might reasonably ask for. Design development services names a phase; it does not name how many revision rounds are included, what triggers additional billing, or what happens when a client's request falls between two adjacent phases, and a client reading only the phase name has no way to know where the included work actually ends. We work through these so the number of revision rounds included at each phase is stated as an actual number, since "design development services" with no stated limit invites a client to assume revisions continue until they are satisfied, which is a different commitment than the firm intended to make; so specific triggers for additional services are named — a change in project scope after a phase is approved, a change in the client's programme requirements, redesign following a budget that exceeds the original estimate — rather than a general reference to "services beyond the agreed scope," given that a client needs to recognise a trigger before it happens, not after the invoice; so any phase deliverable is defined by what it actually contains, because "design development drawings" means something different to different firms and a client comparing this proposal against a previous project's experience needs to know what is specifically included this time; so a request that falls near a phase boundary is addressed at the time it is made, with a clear statement of whether it is included or additional, rather than resolved only once billed; and so a client's specific question about what a phase includes receives a direct answer against the actual fee proposal, not a repetition of the phase name. Proposals written this way mean a client understands what they are buying before the first invoice arrives, not after the one that surprised them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including fee structures, project scope and client correspondence. We are editors rather than architects, quantity surveyors or contract specialists, and we offer no view on fee amounts, scope determinations or contractual disputes. What we can do is make sure the proposal states where included work actually stops.