Choosing Ramp or Procurify When You Bill by Design Phase

BIM and visualization software is usually licensed per seat, and a firm ramping a project team up for a major schematic push often needs more seats temporarily than it needs once the project moves into construction administration. Procurify's requisition model handles this well: a temporary seat request tied to a specific project phase creates a natural end date, rather than adding a seat that quietly becomes permanent because nobody thought to remove it once the phase ended. Ramp's card model works fine for the ongoing baseline of seats the firm always needs, but temporary, phase-driven additions are exactly the kind of purchase that benefits from a documented reason and an expected end date attached from the start.

Rendering services, physical models, and printing for client presentations are often reimbursable, while the firm's own software and internal tools are not. This is the same billable-versus-absorbed distinction other project-based services firms face, and it matters here because architecture and engineering firms collect slowly: receivables run around 100.4 days on average¹, well over three months. Any reimbursable cost that isn't tagged to its project and phase the moment it's incurred is cash the firm is fronting for a long stretch, and it's easy to lose track of a rendering invoice or a material sample order in the flurry of a deadline push. Build the habit of tagging a reimbursable cost the same day it's incurred, while the presentation or milestone it supported is still fresh enough that nobody has to guess which client meeting it was actually for.

Firms in this category typically pay their own vendors in about 36 days², far faster than the 100.4 days it usually takes to collect on an invoice. Material sample orders and subconsultant costs paid upfront during a design phase, before that phase is billed and collected, represent real financing the firm is providing on the project's behalf. Tagging costs to their design phase at the point of purchase is the most direct way to see, project by project, how much of that financing gap the firm is actually carrying at any given time.

Structural, MEP, and other subconsultants typically bill by phase rather than by individual purchase, which makes Procurify's requisition model a natural fit: a purchase order can span an entire phase's engagement rather than requiring a new approval for every invoice. This also gives the firm a single place to check a subconsultant's overall phase budget against what's actually been billed so far, catching a subconsultant that's running ahead of the project's own schedule before it becomes a budget problem at the end of the phase.

The moment one design phase closes and another begins is the natural point to review what the outgoing phase actually cost against what it billed, before attention shifts entirely to the next phase's demands. Pull every reimbursable cost, subconsultant invoice, and temporary software seat tagged to the closing phase, check it against the phase's invoice, and flag anything that was spent but never billed while there's still a reasonable chance to recover it. Firms that skip this and only look back at spend once a project fully closes often find several phases' worth of small, unbilled costs stacked up, each individually forgettable but collectively a meaningful dent in the project's overall margin. This review takes only a few minutes when tagging has been consistent through the phase, and considerably longer, sometimes too long to be worth doing thoroughly, when it hasn't.

At each phase close, work through these steps:

1. Pull every reimbursable cost, subconsultant invoice and temporary software seat tagged to the phase that is closing, before attention moves to the next one.
2. Compare that total against the phase invoice and flag any reimbursable cost that was never billed to the client.
3. Check each subconsultant's running total against the purchase order covering the phase, not against individual invoices in isolation.
4. Remove or reassign temporary BIM seats added for the closing phase if the next phase needs fewer people modeling.
5. Record what the phase cost versus what it billed, so the next phase's budget starts from evidence.

A firm running several projects at different phases simultaneously benefits from Procurify's ability to track phase-level budgets and temporary seat additions across all of them at once. A smaller firm running one or two projects at a time can often manage the same discipline manually with Ramp's card controls and good tagging habits. See Procurify vs Coupa vs Ramp for a look at a third platform.