Published
How Interior Design Studios Can Manage Timesheets Without Losing the Will to Live
The Hours Were Always There. You Just Never Wrote Them Down. Most interior design studios are losing money on every project. Not because the fees are wrong - because the hours never get recorded accurately. Here's what's actually happening, and four ways to fix it.
Author:
Ben D'Souza
Estimated reading time: 5 mins
It's the last Friday of the month. Someone, probably the most senior person in the room, asks the team to fill in their timesheets before they leave. Half the studio has a vague memory of what they did in week one. The other half has given up entirely and will put in a round number that bears no relationship to reality.
This is how interior design studios quietly lose money on projects that looked profitable on paper.
Timesheets have a reputation problem. They feel administrative, retrospective, and entirely disconnected from the actual work of designing spaces. But the data they capture, when captured properly, is the only way to know whether a project fee was right, whether a phase ran over, and whether the person you're thinking of promoting is actually carrying the work or coasting on it. Without it, you're running a business on instinct. Instinct is fine until a handover comes in six weeks late and nobody can explain why.
The question isn't whether to track time. It's how to make the habit stick.
Paper and manual logs
Some studios still use paper timesheets or handwritten logs. There's no software to learn, no login to forget, nothing to crash. For a sole trader or a two-person practice with a single active project, this is not an unreasonable position.
The problem is retrieval. When a client queries an invoice three months after a handover, or when you're pricing a project similar to one you ran eighteen months ago, a stack of handwritten sheets is close to useless. Paper works in the moment. It fails at scale and over time.
Spreadsheet templates
Excel and Google Sheets remain the default for studios that have outgrown paper but haven't committed to dedicated software. A well-built template can capture hours by project, phase, and team member, and with enough formula work, produce a basic cost report.
If you're at that stage, we've built one you can use straight away. Download the free .STUDIO timesheet template - it's formatted for interior design projects, no setup required.
The ceiling is low, though. Spreadsheets require discipline to maintain - they break when someone edits the wrong cell, they don't connect to your procurement or invoicing, and the reports they produce are only as current as the last time someone remembered to update them. Most studios end up with three versions of the same sheet, none of which agrees with the others.
Standalone time tracking tools
Toggl, Clockify, and their equivalents were built for this problem. They're fast, they work on mobile, and they make it genuinely easy to start and stop a timer against a project. For studios that bill on time and materials - particularly those working as sub-consultants - they provide clean, exportable records that hold up to client scrutiny.
The gap is context. A time entry that says "3.5 hours - Kensington project" tells you very little about whether those hours were on concept, on programme management, or chasing a maker for a third time about a lead time that keeps moving. Standalone tools track the hours. They don't tell you what the hours mean.
Integrated project management software
The most useful timesheet systems are the ones that don't feel like a separate task - because they're not. When time tracking sits inside the same tool you use to manage your programme, log procurement, and issue client approvals, the data has somewhere to go. Hours logged against a project phase feed directly into cost reports. You can see, at any point in the project, whether you've burned through your fee allocation on concept before detailed design has even started.
This is what purpose-built interior design software is designed to do. Not time tracking bolted onto a generic project management tool, but a system built around the actual structure of a design project — phases, FF&E schedules, maker relationships, handover documentation - where timesheets are one connected part of a working whole.
The studios that track time well aren't the ones with the most disciplined teams. They're the ones that made it easiest to do — the right tool in the right place, at the moment the work happens. Everything else produces data you'll spend an afternoon trying to trust.
If you know a studio director who's still reconciling last month's hours on a spreadsheet, send this their way.
.STUDIO is project management and specification software built specifically for interior design studios — not adapted from a generic tool, built from the ground up for the way design projects actually work. Specs, procurement, timesheets, client approvals. One place. No spreadsheets. The tour takes 14 minutes.
Further Reading
Running a Design Practice RIBA Business Benchmarking | riba.org/work/insights-and-resources/riba-business-benchmarking Annual data on how UK practices manage fees, resource allocation, and profitability. The executive summary is free to download.
Professional Practice for Interior Designers BIID Professional Practice & Business Development | biid.org.uk/professional-practice-business-development The UK's professional body for interior designers — practical guidance on contracts, fees, VAT, and running a practice correctly.
Fee Structures and Billing Designing Buildings | designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Building_design_and_construction_fees A clear breakdown of how time-based and fixed-fee billing works in practice — useful context for studios reviewing how they charge.
