Three emails arrive over five weeks. The first asks whether the kitchen could be a metre longer. The second asks to see it with the stair the other way round, "just to compare". The third says the client's brother-in-law thinks the roof should be zinc. None of them feels like a request for extra work. Each one is twenty minutes of conversation and half a day of drawing. By the time you invoice, you're eleven per cent down on a fee you were proud of.
The fee never had a chance. A fee is a number; it cannot tell anybody what it bought. The only document that can do that is your schedule of services, and the reason clients keep asking for extra work inside the agreed fee is almost always that your appointment described a relationship rather than a quantity. Fix the quantity and the asking stops — not because the client becomes more reasonable, but because there is now an obvious edge to fall off.
Two mechanisms do the work: deliverables you can count, and triggers that name the moment extra fee starts. Everything below is how we write them.
Most schedules of services fail at the first stage description. "Develop the design in accordance with the client's brief" is not a scope. It's a description of an atmosphere. There is no version of that sentence a client can breach.
Write each stage as a list of things that exist. Nouns, with numbers in front of them.
A Stage 2 paragraph in our own appointments reads closer to this:
Stage 2 (Concept Design) includes: one concept design option developed to the level of a site plan, plans at 1:100, two sections at 1:100 and two elevations at 1:100; one design presentation to the client (up to two hours, remote or at our office); one round of client comments incorporated; one written outline planning strategy of up to two pages. Deliverable: a PDF issue of the above, dated and numbered. Stage 2 is complete on issue.
Notice what that does. The client who wants to see a second option has not been told no — they've been told there is one, which means a second one is a thing they can buy. The client who wants a 1:50 kitchen layout at concept stage can see it isn't there. And you have a completion event, which matters far more than it looks: without one, stages don't end, they just fade, and a stage that never ends can absorb infinite work.
The same discipline applies to site visits. "Periodic inspection" is the single most expensive phrase in the profession. Write a number. Six visits, each up to three hours including travel, with a written report; further visits charged at the hourly rates in Schedule C. You will be asked for the seventh visit. That is fine. That's the point.
Two Rounds Means Two Rounds — So Define a Round
A revision cap is useless until you define the unit. Say "two rounds of comments included" and you'll get eleven emails, and the client will genuinely believe that's one round because it was all about the same drawing.
What we use, and what we teach, is a definition that does three jobs at once:
A round of comments means one consolidated written set of comments, issued by the client within ten working days of our issue, containing all comments from all parties on the client side. Comments received after that set has been issued, or from a party not included within it, constitute a further round.
The consolidation clause is the valuable half. It forces the client to gather their spouse, their business partner and their brother-in-law into one document before it reaches you, which is the difference between one coordinated edit and five sequential ones that each undo the last. It also closes the gradual-creep loophole that no amount of change-control ever catches — scope creep by email is not usually one big request, it's forty small ones, and each one individually is too trivial to invoice for.
How many rounds is reasonable? As a rule of thumb we write two per stage for domestic work and one for commercial where there's a single decision-maker, then price the third round as an additional service rather than refusing it. That's our own practice, not a published standard — adjust it to the client, but write the number down before you find out whether you guessed right.
The Exclusions List Is Doing More Work Than the Inclusions List
Clients don't read inclusions. They read exclusions, because exclusions are where the surprises live, and a client who reads an exclusions list at appointment stage is a client who will not be astonished in month five.
Thirteen items we put in almost every domestic and small-commercial appointment:
Measured building survey and topographical survey.
Structural, M&E, acoustic, ecology, arboricultural and heritage consultant services — and the cost of appointing them.
Coordination of any consultant not named in Schedule A.
Planning application fees, statutory fees, printing and courier costs.
Any planning re-submission, revised application, non-material amendment or appeal.
Pre-application advice beyond one meeting and one written submission.
Party wall notices, awards and the role of party wall surveyor.
Principal Designer duties under the CDM Regulations.
Building Regulations application, technical design and construction information, unless listed as an appointed stage.
Tender documentation, tender action and contract administration.
Interior design, FF&E specification, and kitchen or bathroom layouts beyond indicative arrangement.
3D visualisations, marketing imagery, VR walkthroughs and physical models.
Design options additional to the number stated in each stage.
Item five is the one that pays for the whole document. A planning refusal is a project event nobody controls, and re-submission is not a tweak — it's a re-run of the drawings, the forms, the statements and the portal, and it is entirely ordinary for a practice to do that twice for free because the appointment said nothing about it.
The Standard Forms Give You a Chassis. They Don't Give You a Scope.
A fair question at this point: don't the RIBA's professional services contracts already handle this? Partly. In our experience of using them, the conditions do the legal heavy lifting you shouldn't be drafting yourself — liability, copyright, suspension, termination, complaints — and they're worth having for that alone. But the suite is a set of conditions plus schedules you complete, and the services schedule is a blank you fill in. The bit that stops scope creep is the bit you have to write. The form won't tell you that two rounds of comments means anything in particular, because the form doesn't know your project.
The ARB's Architects Code, at Standard 4 on competent management of your business, is explicit that terms of appointment should be set down in writing and should cover the scope of work, the fee or how it's calculated, the allocation of responsibilities, any constraints, provisions for termination and a complaints procedure — check the current edition on the ARB's own site rather than taking a blog's word for the clause numbering. Meeting that obligation with a two-line email technically clears the bar and protects you from precisely nothing.
Name the Triggers, and Give Them a Rate
A variation mechanism with no rate attached is a suggestion. Two clauses, always paired.
First, list the events that constitute additional services. Ours runs to eight:
Any change to a design element after the relevant stage has been signed off or deemed approved.
A change to the brief — area, budget, unit numbers, use, programme.
Planning refusal, withdrawal, appeal, or amendments required after determination.
The appointment of, or need for, a consultant not named in the appointment, and coordination of their information.
A change in statutory requirements or planning policy after submission.
Redesign arising from third-party information issued late or changed — contractor, supplier, neighbour objection, landlord.
The introduction of a new decision-maker on the client side after a stage has been approved.
Suspension of the project for more than eight weeks, including remobilisation.
Seven is there because of experience. A new spouse, partner, investor or project manager arriving in month four will reopen decisions that were closed, and they will do it in good faith, and it will cost you a fortnight.
Second — hourly rates by grade, in a schedule, reviewed annually. And a clause that says additional services are instructed in writing and confirmed by us in writing before we start, with an estimate of cost and programme effect. Verbal instructions and casual emails don't bind you, and don't bind them. That cuts both ways and it's fairer for it.
Sign-Off, and What Happens When Nobody Signs
The reason revisions hurt isn't the drawing edit. It's re-entering a file you'd closed, re-checking the coordination, re-issuing to consultants who'd already priced off the old set, and re-explaining it all to yourself three weeks later. Which is why sign-off has to have a default.
Our house clause — it's ours, not anybody's standard form, and you should have your own solicitor look at it before you use it:
Where the client does not issue written comments or approval within ten working days of an issue, the issue is deemed approved for the purpose of proceeding to the next stage. Changes requested to a deemed-approved issue are additional services.
That's a view about how to keep a project moving, not a legal certainty. It works because it's mild, visible and reciprocal — and for domestic clients it needs to stay that way, because the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires consumer contract terms to be fair and expressed in plain, intelligible language, and a term the court considers unfair isn't binding on the consumer. A deemed-approval clause buried in nine-point grey type with a two-day window is exactly the sort of thing that gets struck out. Ten working days, stated on the front page, discussed out loud at appointment, is a different animal. While you're there: if you're signing up a domestic client in their kitchen rather than at your office, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 give them a fourteen-day cancellation right and require you to tell them about it — get that notice into your terms, because the penalty for omitting it is not small.
The Sentence That Turns Scope Creep Into an Instruction
The document only works if you say the thing out loud. Here it is, and the tone matters as much as the words:
"That's a good idea, and I'd like to do it. It sits outside what we priced at appointment, so let me send you a short note with the cost and what it does to the programme — if you're happy with it, I'll get straight on."
No apology. No "unfortunately". No implication that the client has done something wrong, because they haven't — they've had an idea, which is what clients are for. You've said yes twice and named a price once. Then follow it within the day with an email that begins "Just to confirm what we discussed", states the fee, states the programme effect, and asks them to reply yes in writing. That reply is your variation instruction.
The practices that bleed fee aren't the ones with weak contracts. They're the ones with decent contracts and no appetite to use the phone. Write the schedule so the edge is obvious, then be the person who cheerfully points at it.
