Architecture Firms Editing and Proofreading Services

Halfway through design development, the client receives an invoice for "additional services: three rounds of design revisions beyond the agreed scope," and is genuinely surprised. The original fee proposal promised "design development services," and nothing in that phrase said revisions were capped at a number. The firm is not wrong that the work happened. The client is not wrong that nobody ever showed them the cap. Both are reading the same proposal, and it is silent on the exact point that just cost $14,000.

The documents we edit for Architecture Firms

Fee proposals and phase scope definitions make up the core of this work. Additional-services trigger disclosures come with them. Revision limit documentation follows, together with the schedules setting out what each phase produces. The rest is correspondence: letters explaining why a particular request falls outside the original agreement, replies to a client asking what a phase was supposed to include, and the short notes that follow a difficult phone call. Our editors work on the sentence that has to say where the included work actually stops.

What the editing involves

The disclosed scope boundary is what a fee proposal has to state, and the usual failure is a phase description broad enough to cover 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 request lands between two adjacent phases. A client reading only the phase name has no way to know where the included work ends, and the number of revision rounds at each phase is the cheapest thing in the document to fix, because it is a number.

Triggers for additional services work best when they are named one by one rather than gestured at. A change in project scope after a phase has been approved is one trigger. A change in the client's program requirements is another, and a redesign forced by a budget that comes in over the original estimate is a third. Each of those is an event a client can recognize before the invoice arrives, which a general reference to "services beyond the agreed scope" is not. Each phase should also be defined by what it actually contains, because design development drawings mean different things at different firms, and a client comparing this proposal against a previous project needs to know what is included this time.

A request falling near a phase boundary is best addressed at the moment it is made, with a plain statement of whether it is included or additional, rather than resolved months later on an invoice for $9,400. A client asking what a phase includes deserves an answer written against the actual proposal, not a repetition of the phase name. Proposals written this way mean the client understands what is being bought before the first invoice arrives, rather than after the one that surprised them.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including fee structures, project scope, and client correspondence. We are editors, not architects, cost consultants, or contract specialists, and we offer no opinion on fee amounts, scope determinations, or contractual disputes. What we can do is make the proposal state where the included work actually stops.