According to the malaysian architects fee schedule, architects are allowed to bill for an amount equal to 70% of their contract fee upon completion of the contract document, the bible which gets costs put to and contractors will bid on. However, it is common practice to have this amount reduced to just over 50% of the contract sum after the rigors of negotiation and payment terms.
There is something absurd about all this.
Logically now. It means that an architect will be due just over 50% of contract fee for the delivery of a document that in a perfect world should be up to 95% complete in order for tenders to be costed accurately.
Seeing that most architects would only have completed what 50% of their fees would have paid for, the simple outcome of all this means tenders coming in much lower than they should. The vulgar bit comes in because everyone is complicit: the deception simply carries on until the variation orders start pouring in when the rest of the drawings get done. It is a ludicrous situation created by a ludicrous belief that risk is minimized in the reduction of fees up front: it legitimizes poor design documentation. The big losers are the very projects we set out to get right.
Let us negotiate fee schedules to correctly reflect the quantity of work performed. When we see how smoothly construction proceeds with a complete document, we might understand why it is that an architect's fee should be near to fully paid before a single brick has even been laid. Architects design. Contractors build. Drawings have to be complete. It couldnt be simpler than that.