Architects
The appointment agreed in writing,before stage one.
Build the terms of appointment and the staged fee proposal from the services you actually offer, send them as one pack, and keep a record of what was agreed and when.
No credit card required.
PROP-004
Letter of engagement 2026/27
Prepared for Okafor Design Ltd by Hartley & Co
One-off fees
charged once
| Service | Fee |
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| Annual accounts and corporation tax | |
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| VAT | |
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Fees are shown per billing period. Amounts for different periods are listed separately and are not added together.
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The three documents
The third one is where the fee is usually lost.
The terms of appointment
Who the parties are, the scope of the services, the fee or how it is calculated, and who is responsible for what. Agreed in writing before the work begins, and it is the document this product carries.
The staged fee proposal
Priced by work stage, which is how practices actually charge. Each stage is quoted as its own line, so a client can see what they are committing to at each point instead of a lump sum with a schedule buried in an appendix.
The additional services instruction
Where the fee argument actually happens: a change of brief, a re-design after planning, an extra consultant to coordinate. Reissue the priced instruction from the same template and get it agreed before the work is done, rather than adding it to the final account and hoping.
Sub-consultant appointments and letters of intent go through the same mechanics if you want them to.
Where this sits in the project
At the very front of it, and nowhere else.
The appointment is the first thing on a project and the one most often handled informally, because everybody is keen to start. Agreed after a dispute has started, it is not an appointment, it is a negotiating position.
This sits at the very front of the project, before stage one. What we carry is the terms, the priced stages, the additional services instruction, the signature and the evidence around all four. Drawings, consultants and the building contract stay wherever they are today.
Price the appointment from your own stage list
Keep your services where you can see them, with a fee against each: the stages you routinely run, the surveys, the consultant coordination. Build the appointment by picking from that list, so the fee the client agrees and the fee you quoted are the same figures.
Send it before the work starts, not after
The appointment goes out as one pack: the terms, the priced stages and anything that has to travel with them. It is signed and dated before the first stage, which is what makes the fee collectable.
Keep what settles the argument
Every send, open and signature is recorded with its time and IP address, and the completed appointment produces a certificate. When a client says two years later that a stage was included, the answer is a document rather than a memory.
Send your next appointment through it.
What settles a fee dispute
The ARB, the UK architects’ regulator, requires the terms of an appointment to be agreed and recorded in writing before any professional service begins, and it has acted on it. The failure is rarely a practice that refuses to write terms. It is a practice that sent them, started work, varied the scope twice by email, and now cannot show which version was agreed. That is an evidence problem, and it is the one this product is built for.
The certificate
Produced automatically when the last signature lands. It lists each signature with its time, actor and IP address, a fingerprint of every document in the appointment, and a QR code linking to an independent check.
Checkable without you
A client, their solicitor or an adjudicator can verify a completed appointment themselves, with no account and no login. It confirms the document, the signers and that the chain is intact, without disclosing what the document said.
Verify a document →CecurSign
Certificate of Completion
Envelope information
- Envelope ID
- 9c1f2a34-5b6d-4e71-8f90-2ad4c6e13b58
- Subject
- Letter of engagement 2026/27
- Created
- 04/06/2026 09:12 UTC
- Sent
- 04/06/2026 09:14 UTC
- Completed
- 05/06/2026 16:41 UTC
Documents
Engagement letter and schedules.pdf (7 pages)
SHA-256: a4f1c9e0b7d3
Signers and recipients
- R. Hartley (Signer)Signed 04/06/2026 11:02 UTC
- J. Okafor (Signer)Signed 05/06/2026 16:41 UTC
Scan to verify
Envelope ID
9c1f2a34-5b6d-4e71-8f90-2ad4c6e13b58
What you would actually be using
The parts of CecurSign that matter to architects, and what each one does here.
Templates
The additional services instruction, kept ready to send the day the scope moves. That document is where the fee argument actually happens, and the usual reason it is lost is that nobody stopped to write one.
Build a document once with its fields, its signers and its reminders, then send it as often as you need without rebuilding it.
Your service list
Work stages priced individually, so a fee proposal is assembled from the stages actually being appointed rather than from a percentage worked out in a meeting.
Every service you sell with its fee, how often it is charged and its VAT treatment, held in one place rather than in three versions of a spreadsheet.
Priced documents
Terms of appointment and the staged fee as one document the client agrees to before stage one, which is while it is still an easy conversation.
Build a priced document from that list, send it as a branded page, and have the client agreeing to it be the signature on it.
Reminders
An appointment that went out and never came back is chased on its own, so work does not quietly begin on an unagreed fee.
Chases that go out on a set pattern while something is unsigned, a nudge you can send by hand, and a deadline you set yourself.
Certificate of completion
What was agreed, when, and for which stages, produced months later without reconstructing it from an email thread.
Produced when the last signature lands: every signature with its time, the person who made it and their IP address, and a fingerprint of each file.
What practices ask before they buy
Short answers to the four that come up most.
Is an electronically signed appointment legally binding?
Our fees run per work stage. Does that survive on the document?
The brief changes after the appointment is signed. What then?
Does this replace the software we already run the practice on?
More detail on how a priced document is built and what the client sees on the proposals page, or see how other companies use it on the industries index.
The four things it does, in your documents
The product does the same four jobs for every firm. This is what each one looks like in yours, and each page describes the job in full.
Proposals and engagement letters
The appointment goes out after the first site visit, priced by the stages actually being appointed, and is agreed before a line is drawn.
Proposals and engagement lettersClient onboarding
The client reads your terms, your fee basis and your professional obligations beside the appointment, and you know which they opened before stage one starts.
Client onboardingContracts and renewals
The day the brief moves, the additional services instruction goes out from the template and is signed before the extra work starts, with the original appointment untouched.
Contracts and renewalsSelf sign
A planning declaration, a certificate for a client's lender, or a form the council sent as a PDF: signed by you alone, in one sitting, and filed with a record.
Signing something yourselfWhat to read next
The parts of the help centre this page assumes, in the order you would meet them.
- Building your service catalogueSet up the services you sell once, and reuse them on every proposal.
- Building a proposalAdding services, writing the letter, and previewing what the client will get.
- Pricing, cadences and VATFixed fees, hourly work, estimates, recurring charges, and how each is shown to the client.
- The certificate of completionThe evidence page attached to every finished document, and how to read it.
Everything else is in the help centre.
Put your next appointment through it
Build one from your own stages, send it to a real client, and look at the certificate that comes back.
No credit card required.