Engineer or architect: how much does it cost you to handle admin yourself?
An engineer or architect bills their time at a precise rate, calculated hour by hour for projects, site visits and consultations. Yet the same professional often spends several hours a week doing something that falls outside that rate: filling in an invoice, answering a question from the accountant, looking for a document ahead of a deadline. Those hours come out of the same twenty-four hours in the day, but they do not generate the same value.
Your time has a price, even when you don't bill it
A freelance engineer in Switzerland usually charges an hourly rate between CHF 100 and CHF 250, depending on experience and the complexity of the projects involved. That figure is what the market recognises for your professional time when you devote it to a project. When those same hours are spent filling in an expense form or looking for a receipt, the value generated is much lower than that figure, because it is work that does not require your specific expertise to be carried out.
The calculation that is rarely made
If an hour of your professional time is worth CHF 150, and you spend 10 hours a month on administrative tasks, those hours represent, in terms of missed opportunity, CHF 1,500 a month, almost CHF 18,000 a year. It does not show up on your bank statement: it is revenue that never comes into being, because those hours have already been spent elsewhere. We discussed this in more general terms in the article how much time do you lose on admin every month?, but for a professional with a defined hourly rate, this calculation becomes particularly concrete.
Why the problem is even more direct for a sole practitioner
In a company with several employees, the time the owner spends on admin blends in with a thousand other activities. In an engineering or architecture practice, often made up of one person or a small team, there is no such dilution: every hour the practice owner spends on an invoice is an hour taken directly away from a project that could be billed at full rate, with no one else able to cover that time instead.
Tasks that weigh more than they seem to
In the day-to-day running of a technical practice, some administrative tasks recur so regularly that they are easy to underestimate: managing invoices and payment reminders, quarterly VAT returns, filing contracts and project documents, handling expense claims for site visits and travel, and corresponding with the accountant about matters that repeat almost identically every month.
What happens if you keep doing it yourself
Beyond the lost revenue, there is the quality of the design work itself, which suffers when attention is split between a technical drawing and a tax deadline on the same morning. We discussed this in the article is the owner still doing everything? 10 tasks an SME should stop handling in-house, where the same pattern repeats across different sectors, but for a professional who bills by the hour, the cost translates into a precise figure.
Why outsourcing admin almost always pays off
Handing administrative management over to an external partner costs a fixed, predictable amount each month, almost always lower than the value of the working hours that this outsourcing gives back to you. It is not about hiring an in-house employee, a step that is rarely justified by the volume of administrative work in a single practice: we discussed this in the article you don't always need to hire: when outsourcing can be the solution.
With our accounting and administration service, we handle invoicing, VAT and administrative obligations for engineering and architecture practices in Ticino, giving professionals back exactly the hours they currently spend on tasks that do not require their technical expertise.
If you have never worked out what handling your practice's admin yourself really costs you, get in touch: we will work through this calculation together using your real hourly rate, and tell you how much you could recover by outsourcing it.
