Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 21 /Dec 2, 2025
Why Monograph's CEO says monthly billing can save your design practice
Robert Yuen, Monograph
Dec 2, 2025 /The Business of AEC
Why Monograph's CEO says monthly billing can save your design practice
Robert Yuen is the co-founder and CEO of Monograph, software that architecture and engineering firms use to plan projects, track time and invoice clients. He trained as an architect and built the product for the firms he came from. His subject is money: how design firms bill, why they should track time even when they bill for value, and how invoice cadence changes cash flow.
Robert Yuen, Co-founder, CEO, Monograph
In this conversation
What firms ran on before Monograph: spreadsheets and eight hours a day of time entry for a little insight into the business.
Robert's answer to the hourly-billing debate, and why efficiency gains make it urgent.
The monthly-invoice argument, including how it opens the door to lending against a firm's receivables.
How AI sits inside nearly every Monograph feature without the company calling itself AI-first.
You should be invoicing and billing based on value.
Robert Yuen
Chapters
A system of record for practice
What a system of record for a design practice should be.
Is the hour the right unit?
Whether the billable hour is the right way to measure an architect's work.
By the numbers
Average profitability of U.S. architecture firms as a share of net billings, 2023
Robert says a firm proud of value billing with no profit at year end has its value measure wrong. This is the margin the average firm actually keeps.
Source: AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 ↗Advice to new founders
Robert's advice to founders building for architecture and engineering.
Invoice monthly
The cash-flow case for invoicing every month.
AI inside the product
Where AI lives inside the product today.
If you don't track your time, how do you know that the value you're getting is even appropriate?
Robert Yuen
Takeaways
Bill for value, but track your time anyway. If you are proud of value billing and there is no profit at year end, your value measure is wrong and you cannot find out why.
Invoice $10,000 monthly instead of $30,000 quarterly. Smaller amounts get paid faster, owners pay more easily, and frequent payment makes a firm underwritable.
A million-dollar contract is not worth a million dollars once you do the math. Managing operations so you do not exceed it is the real problem.
If you're an architect and you are very proud that you're billing based on value and you're not walking away with profit, your value measure is wrong.
Robert Yuen