Scratchpad vs Dooly for an Architecture Practice

Between an initial inquiry and a signed contract, a commercial project can move through a qualifications submission, a shortlist interview, and weeks of programming meetings where the client works out what the building actually needs to do before a fee proposal gets written. A pursuit can look inactive for a month between the interview and the next scheduled touchpoint without anything actually being wrong.

That pacing makes 'days since last activity' a misleading signal on its own. A principal reviewing the pipeline needs to know not just that a pursuit has gone quiet, but whether that silence is expected given where the project sits in a client's own decision timeline, which a generic sales dashboard rarely distinguishes on its own.

Programming meetings surface the details that actually shape a fee proposal and a design approach: a client's real priorities, a budget constraint they did not put in the RFQ, a site issue that came up during a walkthrough. If the principal who attended those meetings does not write the details down clearly, whoever prepares the fee proposal, sometimes a different partner, is working from a thinner account of what the client actually wants.

Dooly's note templates can be structured around a firm's own programming checklist, capturing that detail as it comes up and linking it to the opportunity so it survives the weeks, sometimes months, between the programming phase and the finished fee proposal.

Write down these programming details after each client meeting:

• The client's real priorities for the building, as they described them in the meeting.
• A budget constraint the client did not put in the RFQ.
• A site issue that came up during a walkthrough and may affect the design approach.
• A phasing preference, so whoever prepares the fee proposal works from what the client emphasized.

A principal juggling six or eight active pursuits at different stages, some in qualifications, some in interviews, some in programming, benefits from a single grid view showing each one's stage and next scheduled touchpoint, rather than opening each record separately to remember where things stand. Scratchpad's bulk editing suits the kind of light, frequent updates a slow-moving pursuit needs: a follow-up sent, an interview date confirmed, without treating each one as a separate task.

A managing principal reviewing the firm's whole pipeline gets a similar benefit, seeing at a glance which pursuits are overdue for a touchpoint given how long they have realistically been quiet, without having to ask each principal individually for a status update.

If fee proposals routinely miss what a client actually emphasized during programming, a budget priority, a phasing preference, the gap is on the capture side, and Dooly addresses it directly. If pursuits are well understood but the pipeline looks stale by the time a principal reviews it, unclear on which ones are due for a touchpoint versus genuinely gone quiet, the gap is on the tracking side, and Scratchpad is the faster fix.

A firm can check which gap matters more by reviewing its last three unsuccessful pursuits: if the proposal clearly reflected the client's stated priorities and still lost, the issue was not tracking. If the proposal reads generic against what programming meetings revealed, that is the fixable gap, and it is usually the more common one on a busy pursuit calendar.

Neither tool should ask a principal to behave like a quota-carrying rep checking in weekly on every pursuit; the cadence here is inherently slower. What matters is that whatever cadence a specific client relationship actually calls for, monthly, after each major meeting, quarterly for a slow public project, gets a note attached to it, so a pursuit that has stayed quiet for six full weeks because that is simply how the client's own decision process works does not get mistaken for one that has actually gone cold and needs an urgent follow-up call from a partner instead of a routine check-in.