Fee Tracker

The fee side of a project is three numbers that drift apart: what the contract says, what the work has earned, and what has actually been billed and paid. Small firms lose real money in the gaps between them, usually by forgetting the middle one. This keeps the three side by side, per project, with the arithmetic visible.

Scope and limits — read first

What this does. Maintains docs/practice/fees.md: the contract fee broken by phase with its source, percent complete per phase as you state it, earned fee computed from the two with the arithmetic shown, an invoice log with issued, paid, and outstanding status, and an aging view of what is unpaid as of a date you give. Answers "where are we against the fee" from the file alone.

What this does not do.

• It does not estimate anything. Not the fee (fee-estimator does that, before the contract), not percent complete, not what a phase should cost. Percent complete is your professional judgment, stated by you, dated.
• It is not accounting. No tax, no ledger, no revenue recognition rules, no payroll or overhead costs. What it computes is arithmetic on the numbers you logged, for your own steering.
• It does not draft or send invoices, and it does not chase clients. It can tell you which invoice to chase.
• It does not track the office's costs or hours. Earned here means fee times progress, not effort spent.
• Additional services are logged as their own fee lines when you state them; whether something is an additional service is a contract question it does not decide.
• One project per file. Office-wide roll-ups are a different view this file feeds, not one it contains.

What you need before starting. The contracted fee and its phase breakdown, from the agreement, cited. After that: progress statements, invoices, and payments as they happen.

Workflow

Step 1. Bootstrap if needed

Check whether docs/practice/fees.md exists. If not, copy assets/fee-tracker-template.md there and record the project, the currency as the contract states it, and the fee table with the agreement article each line comes from. If the project has no docs/ folder at all, confirm before creating one.

Step 2. Record progress

When you state a phase's percent complete, record it with the date and your one-line basis. The previous figure moves to the history, never overwritten. Then recompute earned:

Phase <name>
  fee               <as contracted>  [cited]
  percent complete  <as stated, dated>
  earned            <arithmetic>
Earned to date      <sum across phases>

Step 3. Record invoices and payments

One row per invoice: number, date, period or phase it bills, amount, status issued, paid, partial, disputed, with dates. A payment updates the row, dated; a partial payment records both figures.

Step 4. Report

On "where are we", compute and show, as of the date you give:

Earned to date      <n>
Billed to date      <n>
Unbilled earned     <arithmetic>     <- the money being forgotten
Outstanding         <sum of unpaid invoices>
  aging             <each unpaid invoice, days since issue>

Unbilled earned is stated first. It is the number this file exists for.

Step 5. Amendments

A fee change (amendment, additional service) is a new fee line with its own source, never an edit to the original. The contract history stays readable.

Rules

• Every fee line cites the agreement or the amendment it comes from.
• Percent complete is stated, dated, and attributed to you. Never inferred from time elapsed, invoices sent, or drawings issued.
• Show the arithmetic on earned, unbilled, and aging, every time.
• History over overwrite. Progress and status changes append.
• Currency as the contract states it. No conversion, ever.
• Nothing is deleted; a cancelled invoice is marked void, dated.

Anti-patterns

• Estimating percent complete from the calendar because a statement is overdue.
• Treating billed as earned, which hides exactly the gap that matters.
• Logging an amendment by editing the original fee table.
• Netting a disputed invoice out of the totals so the report reads clean.
• Turning the file into a time sheet. Effort is a different axis.

Resources

• assets/fee-tracker-template.md — the file this creates, empty.

No reference files. The numbers come from your contract and your invoices, not from here.