The Hidden Labor Tax

What Poor CA Tools Actually Cost Architecture Firms

Architects routinely lose 10–15 hours every week to construction-administration busywork that adds zero design value. Here's what that costs—and how to stop paying it.

A familiar Friday at 4:30 PM

You should be reviewing design options. Instead you're:

• Hunting through 47 email threads for the GC's reply to RFI-023

• Downloading (again) the same submittal PDF because the folder's a mystery

• Copy-pasting notes from email into a tracking spreadsheet

• Checking four different places just to know what's overdue

None of this is architecture. It's admin friction masquerading as project management.

I call it the Hidden Labor Tax.

What is the Hidden Labor Tax?

It's the overhead created when CA is run on tools that weren't built for how architects work:

Context-switching: Procore → email → spreadsheets → shared drives, just to answer "what's the status?"

Double entry: The same RFI gets typed into three systems because they don't talk to each other.

Status archaeology: Reconstructing who reviewed what, when, and with which comments.

Deadline panic: Critical items buried in siloed tools—surfacing them takes heroics.

Why this happens: the Tool Gap

Design tools (Revit, AutoCAD, BIM 360) stop at CDs. Contractor platforms (Procore, Fieldwire, Buildertrend) start at groundbreak—and they're optimized for GCs, not architects.

CA sits in the gap. Most firms bridge it with email and spreadsheets. That gap is where the tax accrues.

The real cost

Time cost 10–15 hours/week per architect → 480–720 hours/year. At $150/hr: $72k–$108k per person—for work that doesn't advance design or fees.

Opportunity cost Those hours could fund: design development, client care, BD, mentoring, or simply getting home by 5:30.

Quality cost Poor visibility leads to rushed reviews, thin RFI responses, surprise change orders, and punch-list items that could have been caught earlier.

Stress cost The mental load of "what am I forgetting?" Sunday scaries. On-the-spot questions about RFI-017 with no single source of truth.

Breaking the tax

Talking to the founders of Roundhouse, Craig James and Stuart Romm, principals at Praxis3 Architecture in Atlanta, they got tired of watching talented architects do administrative archaeology instead of architecture. So their team asked a simple question:

What if CA software were purpose-built for architects?

Not generic PM. Not GC-first platforms. Architect-first CA.

That's why they built Roundhouse: architect-first CA software designed to eliminate the tax at its source. Three core capabilities make it work:

Skyview – Portfolio-wide visibility in one dashboard See every submittal, RFI, and deadline across all projects without logging into multiple systems.

Modules – Purpose-built workflows for submittals, RFIs, field observations, and change orders Link information automatically—no duplicate entry.

Platform – Adapts to your firm Your terminology, branding, and process—not the other way around.

Roundhouse doesn't eliminate CA (that's part of the job). It removes the administrative overhead that makes CA feel like drowning.

Results firms report

• 75% less time on status updates (from ~2 hours/day to ~30 minutes in one place)

• 30% fewer project delays via early bottleneck detection

• 95% on-time submittal completion thanks to automatic surfacing of urgency

"I got five hours back in my week. I tracked it." — Project Architect

See Roundhouse in action

Explore a live demo — Jump into two complete firm workspaces with real project data. No signup.

Schedule a 15-minute walkthrough — Talk with an architect about your CA bottlenecks and get a concrete plan.