Build Your Own Project Intake Worksheet Before Comparing Tools

Start your worksheet with the basics that have to be confirmed before design work begins: signed owner contract, program or space requirements document, and site survey. List a specific owner or client-side contact for each, since a program requirements document that lives only in someone's inbox, unconfirmed by the actual decision-maker, tends to get revised mid-design in ways that cost real rework.

Both GuideCX and Arrows can hold this column as a straightforward task list. The choice starts to matter in the columns that follow.

List every consultant your project needs: structural, MEP, civil, sometimes landscape or interiors. For each, note what they need from you before they can start, typically your base building plans, and what you need from them before you can proceed, typically their coordinated drawings before a design development submission.

This is where GuideCX's dependency modeling earns its place: structural drawings blocking your DD submission, MEP coordination blocking a permit-ready set. Arrows has no equivalent, treating each consultant deliverable as an unrelated task rather than a blocker on your own next milestone.

Note the permitting authority, the submission package requirements specific to that jurisdiction, and a realistic review-duration estimate based on your firm's own history there, not a generic assumption. Permitting is almost always the least controllable column on the worksheet, and it deserves its own honest duration estimate rather than optimistic rounding.

List every point where the client has to approve something before the project can proceed: schematic design, design development, construction documents. For each gate, name the specific person with approval authority, since a design package "sent for review" to a general client contact with no clear decision-maker tends to sit for weeks with no one accountable for a response.

Arrows' passwordless, client-facing task list works well here if the client's only job is to review and approve a shared plan. GuideCX's structure adds value only if approval gates also need to trigger internal billing milestones or block a subconsultant's next phase.

A firm whose worksheet is dominated by consultant dependencies and multi-phase approval gates that genuinely block each other should lean toward GuideCX. A firm whose worksheet is mostly client-facing review and approval steps, with fewer interdependent consultant deliverables, most likely does fine on Arrows' simpler structure.

Build the worksheet honestly before choosing the tool, rather than choosing the tool and hoping your process fits it.

Read your finished worksheet this way:

• If consultant dependencies and multi-phase approval gates dominate and genuinely block each other, lean toward GuideCX.
• If the worksheet is mostly client-facing review and approval steps with few interdependent consultant deliverables, Arrows' simpler structure likely does fine.
• Name a specific decision-maker for every client approval gate, since gates without one tend to stall.
• Base permitting durations on your firm's own history in that exact jurisdiction, not an industry-wide average.

Even a thorough four-column worksheet misses one thing neither tool can track for you: whether the client's internal decision-making process actually matches what they told you at kickoff. A client who said their facilities director has final approval authority, but who in practice routes every decision through a board committee that meets quarterly, will blow through every deadline in your worksheet regardless of how well it's built.

Ask directly during intake how decisions have actually been made on the client's past projects, not just who holds the title of decision-maker on paper, and build your approval-gate timeline around that reality rather than the org chart.

A worksheet built at intake reflects what you knew before design work started, and real projects reveal new information as they progress, an unexpected site condition, a program requirement that changes once the client sees an actual floor plan. Revisit the worksheet at the design development milestone specifically, updating consultant dependencies and approval gates against what's actually happened so far, not just what was originally assumed.

A worksheet that's never updated after kickoff slowly becomes fiction, technically complete on paper but disconnected from the project's real state, which defeats the purpose of building it in the first place.

Set a recurring calendar reminder tied to each project's milestone dates rather than relying on someone to remember, since the review is easy to skip when a project team is busy and nothing has visibly gone wrong yet. The firms that keep their worksheets genuinely current are rarely the ones with the most process discipline in the abstract, they're the ones who made the review a scheduled, non-optional step rather than a good intention.