Ask any architectural practice "what is your fee recovery rate?" and you will likely get a pause, followed by either "I am not sure" or a number that is actually their utilization rate. The two are different, and confusing them costs practices money.
Fee recovery rate = (fees actually billed and collected) / (fees originally quoted for the work delivered)
It is not the same as utilization rate (billable hours / total hours). Utilization tells you how much time your team spends on billable work. Fee recovery tells you how much of that work you actually get paid for.
A practice can have 70% utilization and 82% fee recovery — meaning they are doing plenty of billable work, but writing off or failing to collect 18% of what that work was worth.
Consider two scenarios for a 15-person practice with £1.2M in quoted fees:
Practice A: 68% utilization, 92% fee recovery = £1,104,000 collected
Practice B: 74% utilization, 84% fee recovery = £1,008,000 collected
Practice B works harder (higher utilization) but earns less money. The difference is fee recovery — the gap between what work is worth and what the practice actually charges and collects.
1. Scope write-offs (typically 8-15% of fees). Work done beyond the agreed scope that is not billed. The most common cause: scope creep that was not flagged until it was too late to have the conversation with the client.
2. Fee disputes (typically 3-7% of fees). Work that was billed but disputed by the client, resulting in a reduced payment. The most common cause: inadequate documentation of what was agreed and instructed.
3. Bad debt (typically 2-4% of fees). Work that was billed but never paid. The most common cause: invoicing too late (after practical completion when the client has no incentive to pay promptly) or invoicing without a clear audit trail of value delivered.
You need three numbers for each project:
A: Original fee quoted for the scope delivered (adjusted for legitimate variations)
B: Fees actually invoiced
C: Fees actually collected
Fee recovery rate = C / A, expressed as a percentage.
Track this at the project level, the project lead level, and the practice level. The insights are different at each:
Project level: Which projects are leaking? Why?
Project lead level: Are certain leads consistently under-recovering? Is it a scoping problem, a client management problem, or a documentation problem?
Practice level: What is the trend? Is fee recovery improving or declining?
A fee recovery dashboard should show:
Live fee recovery rate for all active projects (updated weekly)
Trend over the past 12 months
Breakdown by project lead
Early warning: projects where time-spent exceeds 70% of fee allocation before 70% of work is complete
This last metric — the early warning — is the most valuable. It flags problems before they become write-offs. A conversation with the client about additional fees at 70% completion is infinitely more productive than one at 110% completion.
36% of UK architecture practices are not confident they are recovering all the fees they are owed (RIBAJ 2026). On £1.2M in annual fees, recovering just 3% of fees currently going unbilled or unrecovered would represent £36,000 in additional revenue — from work you have already delivered.
Asite's Project Dashboards provide exactly this: live WIP vs. invoiced tracking, project-level and portfolio-level views, and early warning triggers when projects are trending over budget. It is the single fastest way to improve your fee recovery rate.