23 Apr How Factor AE Transforms Design Firms: Smarter Project Management, Real-Time Financials, and True Business Visibility

One of the most common challenges with our business owners in the design, architecture, and engineering world is a disconnect between what is happening day-to-day on projects and what leadership sees in the financial reports. Too often, these teams use a combination of time trackers, spreadsheets, email chains, and QuickBooks to keep their firm running — but without a clear, connected view of what’s working, what’s at risk, and where the opportunities lie.

That’s precisely the problem Factor AE solves — especially when integrated with QuickBooks Online (QBO). This article will walk you through what Factor AE is, how it integrates with your accounting system, and what specific business problems it addresses for firm owners and leadership teams. If you’re in a design-based architectural or engineering business, this is the clarity you’ve been searching for.

What is Factor AE?

Factor AE is a cloud-based business operations platform built for professional services, particularly A/E/C firms and design studios. It combines project management, time tracking, invoicing, utilization planning, and performance reporting into one elegant system. While many firms use separate systems for each of these areas (a time tracker here, invoicing over there, and reports stitched together in Excel), Factor AE brings it all under one roof.

For design firms working on multi-phase client projects, juggling internal schedules, and trying to track profitability on the fly, this level of integration is not just convenient — it’s essential.

Let’s break it down. With Factor AE, you can:

– Assign and manage projects and phases with budgets and deadlines

– Track time and expenses directly to those projects

– Create accurate, flexible invoices from that data

– Monitor key KPIs like utilization, realization, and profitability

– Push clean, consistent data into QuickBooks Online for accounting and receivables

How Factor AE Integrates with QuickBooks Online

Factor AE is not an accounting tool — and that’s a good thing. It’s your operations layer, while QuickBooks remains your financial system of record. The integration between the two is where the magic happens.

Here’s how it works:

1. Team members enter time and expenses in Factor AE, linked to clients and projects.

2. Invoices are created from approved time and billing rules — whether hourly, fixed, or milestone-based.

3. Those invoices are automatically pushed to QuickBooks Online. From there, your accounting team manages AR, payments, and reporting.

4. When payment is made in QBO, Factor AE reflects it, keeping both systems in sync.

This reduces double-entry, eliminates version-control issues, and allows each team (operations and accounting) to focus on the tools that are designed for them.

Solving the Real Business Problems for Owners and Leadership

If you’ve ever had a project overrun its budget, or if you’ve hired new staff only to realize later that your utilization was too low to support them, you already understand the core issues Factor AE solves.

1. Lack of Visibility in Project Profitability

With Factor AE, each project is set up with expected budgets and time allocations. As the team works, you see real-time data on hours used, percentage complete, and how close you are to over-servicing a client. This is critical for design firms where hours and scope can easily expand beyond the original proposal.

2. Disconnected Time and Billing

Many firms use one tool to log time, another to send invoices, and a third to track profitability. Factor AE simplifies this. You enter time once, and it flows through to the invoice, to the budget report, and to the profitability dashboard — all without retyping or exporting anything.

3. Missed Invoicing Opportunities

Because invoicing is tied directly to actual time and project progress, you never forget to bill for a meeting, revision, or site visit. This alone can increase monthly billing by 5–10% in some firms, simply by ensuring no time slips through the cracks.

4. Limited KPI Awareness

Utilization, realization, write-downs, WIP — these aren’t just accounting terms. They’re the pulse of your firm’s efficiency. Factor AE offers real-time dashboards that let owners and partners track these metrics and make proactive decisions, instead of waiting until month-end reports are compiled.

A Design Firm Use Case: Hampton Design 

Let’s look at an example. Hampton Design is a 20-person interior design firm with projects ranging from single-room redesigns to multi-million-dollar corporate buildouts. They were using Toggl for time tracking, Google Sheets for project budgets, and QuickBooks for invoicing. Leadership constantly fell behind: invoices were sent late, project budgets were often exceeded without warning, and utilization varied wildly month to month.

After implementing Factor AE, they are now:

– Set up each new client engagement with clear phases, budgets, and team assignments

– Track hours daily, tied directly to those phases

– Invoice at the end of each month with full confidence in accuracy

– Review dashboards weekly to see which projects are on target, and which are drifting

– Sync all billing and payment data directly into QBO for reconciliation

The result? Hampton Design reduced late invoices by 90%, cut write-downs in half, and made two key hiring decisions based on real data, not gut instinct. That’s the kind of visibility every firm needs — and it’s only possible when your project and financial data talk to each other.

KPIs That Matter: What You Can Measure

Factor AE makes it easy to track and act on the metrics that matter. A few examples:

– Utilization Rate: Percentage of time your team spends on billable work vs. total capacity

– Realization Rate: How much of that billable time turns into revenue

– Project Profitability: Revenue vs. cost per project, including write-downs

– Work-in-Progress (WIP): Value of work performed but not yet billed

– Over/Under Billing: Are you ahead or behind on client budgets?

With this information at your fingertips, your leadership team can make strategic decisions based on facts, not assumptions. Whether you’re deciding when to hire, how to price, or where to invest — these KPIs give you the confidence to act.

More Than a Tool, It’s a Business Strategy

Factor AE is far more than just another app — it’s a transformative tool that reshapes how service-based firms operate, strategize, and grow. It brings together your project data, team performance, billing, and financial visibility into one intelligent platform — and when combined with QuickBooks Online, it becomes the core infrastructure of a well-run firm.

Firms that were once flying blind are now making decisions based on real-time insights. They’ve restructured staffing plans using utilization data, shifted pricing strategies based on project profitability, and finally aligned their billing process with actual project execution. In many cases, clients have even redefined their business models because the data in Factor AE revealed what was truly working — and what wasn’t.

What started to improve time tracking or invoicing has become a central part of their business strategy. That’s the power of a tool that doesn’t just track activity — it drives decisions.