Everything Vellum does for an architecture firm

Every project has an identifier that's unique within your firm, a client, an office and, if you like, a responsible employee. Its status says where it stands: New, Missing Documentation, Ready, Ongoing or Concluded. Statuses can move in any direction — a concluded project goes back to Ongoing if the client returns with changes.

While a project is Ongoing, the team records which stage it's in. Stages come from the project type, which describes the steps of your method — Preliminary Study, Permitting, Construction Documents — and the expected duration of each. The Stages History tab keeps the date of every change, and that's where the duration statistics come from.

The project list shows each project's status, stage, due date and responsible employee, and flags the ones past their due date. It filters by stage, status and type, and search looks through every field. On the dashboard, the daily summary brings together today's events and upcoming and overdue deadlines.

Every project has a Files tab with a folder for each of the project type's stages, plus any free-form folders you create for engineering disciplines, studies or client documents. You upload from your computer, up to 100 files at a time and up to 500 MB each.

Vellum accepts the formats an architecture firm works with: PDF, Office documents, images, ZIP, RAR and 7z, DWG, DXF and DWF, RVT and RFA, IFC, NWD and NWC, SKP, 3DM, OBJ, STL, glTF, FBX, 3DS, Blender and Cinema 4D files, and video. Files are stored ready to download, and open in each person's own software.

In stages marked as review, each file has a status — Pending Review, Approved or Changes Requested — and a history of who reviewed it, the decision, the note and the date. There are no automatic versions: a new version comes in as a new file, in a new submission (Submission #2, Submission #3…), and the earlier ones are kept with their history.

On the Core and Professional plans, each client can have a client-portal account: a web app at your firm's own address that works on a computer and installs on a phone. Your team creates the account, with an automatically generated password you can email to the client — nobody signs themselves up.

In the portal, the client sees their projects and the stages they're in. In stages marked as client review, they open and download the files and approve or request changes on each one, or on several at once; when requesting changes, the note is required. Each new submission in one of those stages emails them a link to the portal.

The client also sees the review history and the events they attend, which they can add to their own calendar, and can write to your firm from the portal. They can't upload files, and they never see other clients, your team, your firm's calendar or billing.

The calendar brings the whole team's schedule together, with month, week and day views. Every event has a title, a start and end time, an office and a type. Your company starts with three types — Meeting, Site visit and Deadline — and Admins can create others.

An event can be linked to a project, and then it also shows in that project's Events tab. You can invite employees and clients: each attendee has a status — Pending, Confirmed or Declined — and clients get an email when the event is created or changed, and see it in the portal.

Statistics use what your team already records — statuses, stages and dates — with no extra work. How many tabs you get depends on the plan: Free has Pipeline; Core has Overview, Delivery and Project Types; Professional has eight tabs: Pipeline, Delivery, Clients, Volume, Type Mix, Stage Duration, Offices and Bottleneck.

On Core, you compare each stage's actual duration with the expected one, for concluded projects. On Professional, Stage Duration shows each stage's average days against the estimate, Delivery shows delays against the planned dates, and Bottleneck picks out projects stuck in Missing Documentation or waiting for the client's review, plus the ones that have been ongoing the longest.

On the Professional plan, your company can have as many offices as it needs; Free and Core have one. Every project and every event belongs to an office, and Admins manage offices on the Locations page.

The Offices statistics tab compares the volume and performance of each office's projects. There are no per-office permissions: the whole team sees every office's work, which keeps information in one place when people work across branches.

There are two permission levels. General employees create and edit projects, clients and events, review files and can delete clients. Admins also manage employees, permissions, offices and project types, and can delete projects. Whoever creates the company is its owner: always an Admin, and the one who handles billing.

To join the team, an employee signs up and gets a 6-digit code, valid for 4 hours. They send it to an Admin, who enters it under Employees, and the employee joins as General. On Core and Professional, each person takes a seat on the subscription; Free is for one person.

Visibility is company-wide: every employee sees every project, client and event, so nobody waits for something to be shared with them.

On the Professional plan, every project has a History Actions tab, and clients, employees and offices have a View history button. Each entry says who did what, and when: who created or updated the project, who added a stage, who reset a client's password.

When someone asks why a project changed, the answer is in the record itself, without relying on anyone's memory.