Most UK practices still run fees on Excel and proposals in Word. It feels free. Here's what it actually costs — and when it's still the right call.
Spreadsheets and Word templates are the real incumbent. Almost every UK practice under fifty staff started here: a fee worked out in Excel, copied into a Word proposal, sent as a PDF, tracked in a spreadsheet or from memory, then re-keyed into Xero when it's time to invoice. It's flexible, it's familiar, and it has no monthly invoice — which is exactly why it's the hardest habit to leave.
The honest catch is that the cost is real but invisible. It doesn't show up as a line on your P&L; it shows up as director hours that could have gone to winning work or delivering it, and as the occasional pricing slip, missing exclusion or inconsistent set of terms. Arkavio's case isn't "spreadsheets are bad" — it's that once you're past a couple of proposals a month, a single platform where your real costs feed every fee, project and invoice tends to pay for itself quickly. Below we lay out both sides, including where staying on spreadsheets is genuinely the smarter choice.
| Arkavio | Spreadsheets + Word | |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front cost | £179/month per practice, ex VAT, everything included — no per-seat pricing. 14-day free trial (card required). Founding Partner £99/month locked for 12 months for the first 20 UK practices. | No subscription. The licences you likely already own (Excel/Google Sheets, Word) — so it feels free at the point of use. |
| What it really costs | A fixed, visible monthly fee you can weigh against the director hours it frees up. | Director time, invisible on the P&L. As an illustration only: 4 proposals a month at ~5 hours each, at a £150/hour charge-out rate, is around £3,000 of director time a month — and even at half recovery, roughly £18,000 a year of under-recovered profit. Your own numbers will differ; this is arithmetic, not a measured statistic. |
| Fee calculation | A breakeven engine: set up your company profile once (salaries by grade, overheads, PI, utilisation, target margin) and every fee is derived from a per-grade hourly breakeven and recommended charge-out rate. | Whatever formulas you've built into the sheet. As flexible as you make it, but the maths is only as current and as correct as the last person to edit the file. |
| RIBA stages | Fees allocated across RIBA Plan of Work stages with scope per stage, built in. | Possible to lay out by hand, but stage structure and scope live in each template and can drift between proposals unless someone maintains them. |
| Consistency and errors | One source of truth — terms, rates and exclusions come from the same place every time, so proposals don't contradict each other. | Each proposal is a copy of the last one. Easy to carry forward a stale rate, a broken formula, a missing exclusion or last client's name. |
| Proposal to invoice | An accepted proposal becomes a project and feeds VAT-compliant invoicing (VAT summary, UK statutory late-payment interest) — no re-keying. | Project details re-entered by hand into Xero or QuickBooks at invoicing time, with the re-keying errors that invites. |
| Tracking and visibility | Live status on proposals, projects and invoices, plus per-project margin and a cashflow view (outstanding, overdue, days-to-pay). | A tracking spreadsheet or memory. Project profitability is often only clear at year-end, if then. |
| Setup and switching | Self-serve sign-up with no onboarding call — you can start today and build your first proposal the same session. There's a new workflow to learn. | Nothing to set up and nothing to learn — you already know Word and Excel. The switching cost is mostly psychological, not technical. |
14-day free trial · cancel anytime · £179/month, ex VAT