This already exists. Nothing below rebuilds it.

A fee proposal is the fee

What changes is the kind of truth. Not the structure.

  1. Proposed

    Concept design
    Design development
    Authority submission
    Documentation
    Contract administration

    A structure offered to a client. Nothing is owed yet, and every division is a claim about the work.

  2. Contractual

    Concept design
    Design development
    Authority submission
    Documentation
    Contract administration

    The client accepts. The same divisions become the terms the project runs on, without being retyped into anything.

  3. Actual

    Concept design
    Design development
    Authority submission
    Documentation
    Contract administration

    Time is recorded and invoices are claimed against those divisions, so what was proposed is what is measured.

Authored once, and never retyped.

Fee proposals

The proposal is not a document about the fee. It is the fee

One set of divisions, set once

Value typeProposalCommercial intent the client has not accepted yet.

The stages are set here, once, while the work is still being won. This is the only moment anybody decides what the divisions are.

The marks above are the same marks in all three rows, because there is only one set of them — a proposal becomes the project’s fee structure rather than being rebuilt as one. Every figure in Mudo carries its kind, so a proposal can never be shown under a contractual label; the three kinds named here are the application’s own. Stage proportions and claim marks are illustrative — no amount, client, project or date is real.

In short

AvailableAvailable now to practices on a qualifying plan.
What it is
Fee proposal tools built around architectural stages: a structured fee, a scope, a document the client can read, and an online acceptance the practice can rely on.
Who it is for
Practices writing fee proposals in a word processor and rebuilding the same fee structure in a spreadsheet afterwards.
What is different
The proposal is not a document that describes a fee. It is the fee. When the client accepts, the project starts with those stages and those amounts already in place.
Availability
Available on every plan, including the free Starter tier.
How it connects
Proposals draw on the lead that produced them and become the project's fee structure, which invoicing then claims against.

Part of Win.

Verified against the Mudo application on .

A proposal is a commercial instrument

Most fee proposals are written as documents and then, separately, entered as numbers. The document is what the client agreed to. The numbers are what the practice invoices against. When they disagree, and over a two-year project they will, the document wins and the practice absorbs the difference.

Mudo removes the second version. The proposal carries the stages and the amounts, the client accepts that, and the project inherits it.

Stages, because architecture is staged

Architectural fees are structured by stage, and the stage is what makes a claim legitimate. Concept complete, DA lodged, documentation issued. The stage is the event that entitles the practice to be paid.

Software that treats a fee as a single total cannot express this, which is why practices end up maintaining the real structure somewhere else.

Common questions

What should an architectural fee proposal include?

At minimum: the stages of work, what is included and excluded at each, the fee against each stage, what triggers an invoice, and what happens when the scope changes. Structuring it by stage is what makes the fee claimable later without a negotiation about what was meant.

Can clients accept a proposal online?

Yes. Proposals can be issued to a client through a private link and accepted there, which produces a dated record of what was agreed rather than an email thread that has to be reconstructed later.

Does the fee carry into the project?

Yes, and this is the reason the capability exists. An accepted proposal establishes the project's fee stages, so invoicing claims against the thing the client signed rather than against a re-entered approximation of it.

What this page is based on

Every capability described here was checked against the running application before publication. These are the parts of it you can open for yourself.

  • /growth/fee-proposalsThe fee proposals screen in the application.
  • /p/:tokenPUBLIC_PROPOSAL_VIEW, token-scoped client acceptance, outside the authenticated application.

Send a proposal the project can actually start from.

Free for solo practices: one user, two projects, no card.