ICMA Architectures
Architects
25 pages
Of Excel
2 use cases
Site & design reports
1mn
To switch
Switch
January 2026
Previous tools
Word, Excel
Outcomes
Make the meeting report actually readable
Share ICMA'S method across the firm
Put design and construction decisions on the record
Louise AIMONETTO · Co-Managing Partner
ICMArchitectures · Aix-les-Bains · France
With Gauthier Martinez, her partner, she took over a firm in March 2024 that had been founded twenty-two years earlier in Aix-les-Bains. The offices stayed. The staff stayed. The name stayed.
The method started to change.
Louise didn't hate job site meeting reports. She hated what they had become.
"Nobody likes writing a meeting report. Nobody likes reading one. They're such a pain."
The firm had a documentation logic inherited from Étienne Martinez, architect, former principal, and expert witness: prove it, document it, protect yourself. By trade package, by contractor, by liability. The signature of a man used to defending his files in court.
It's good logic. It's not the only thing a meeting report needs to do.
“Nobody likes writing a meeting report. Nobody likes reading one. They're such a pain.”
Louise AIMONETTO
ICMA
Twenty-five pages of Excel
The inherited logic held: prove it, document it, protect yourself. Louise used it for real. When a contractor disputed something, she'd go back into old meeting reports to find the request, the date, the trade involved.
"Whenever there's a dispute, we dig back into the meeting reports, back into the photos, and we show them. We might be wrong — but proving things, yes, we can do that."
The paper trail was there. It worked. But keeping it up was expensive.
At ICMA, Alexandra played a role that's rare in the industry: technical administrator. She prepared the administrative documents, proofread meeting reports, corrected them, checked exports, sent them out. Louise barely knew another firm with that position.
"We'd rather have someone own it."
Even with Alexandra, the system was heavy. Photos in Excel were a nightmare : screenshot, paste, cells shifting. Louise had almost stopped including them entirely. Other staff put in a lot. The quality of the document depended on who made it.
There, legibility becomes a condition of proof
Louise wasn't looking for a prettier meeting report. She was looking for one contractors would actually read.
She knew nobody read the whole thing. Some went straight to their trade section. Some barely opened it.
"The contractor needs to look at the meeting report and confirm: OK, they marked me present. General notes come first, it's readable. Then they go straight to their package."
A report nobody reads is a comment nobody sees. A comment nobody sees can be disputed. Legibility isn't aesthetic, it's a condition of proof.
Small firms don't think in licenses
Before There, Louise looked at other options. She considered Archipad. A colleague used it on a tablet. The idea appealed to her.
Then she saw the model: €50 per license, per month.
ICMA's workload isn't linear. Projects start, projects wind down. Buying licenses per person, managing tablets, figuring out who uses which one, the promise turned against how they actually work.
She dropped the idea.
Then Antoine Gamond, co-founder of There, reached out. They knew each other. The trust made the first test easier. But it wasn't the personal connection that convinced the firm.
It was the model.
One subscription for the entire firm. Unlimited users. Billed by document volume. Accessible from any device.
"What I liked was that we weren't tied to individual licenses, we all operate under one shared account: we're all under ICMA."
For a firm already running a dozen software subscriptions, a tool that flexes with the workload rather than fighting it is worth something.
“What I liked was that we weren't tied to individual licenses, we all operate under one shared account: we're all under ICMA.”
Louise AIMONETTO
ICMA
"One minute to convince me"
"One minute to convince me. Our meeting reports were so ugly. And Excel, I hate Excel."
She mentioned it to her partners. The firm waited until January 2026, when active projects would justify the subscription. There prepared the base documents: templates, headings, icons. Without that initial setup work, ICMA would have spent a long time reconfiguring everything from scratch.
Louise adopted it fast. Jules, a project architect on staff, did too: heavy on visuals, lots of photos, annotations, edited images. Gauthier and Victoria rotate depending on the project. Alexandra stays on review, export, and distribution.
“One minute to convince me. Our meeting reports were so ugly. And Excel, I hate Excel.”
Louise AIMONETTO
ICMA
When methods start moving through the firm
Before There, every meeting report lived in its own project folder. Habits stayed siloed.
On There, Jules built a weather-delay tracking table. Louise picked it up. He built a table for submittals and spec sheets. She took that too.
"I went to see how Jules had done his weather-delay table. I borrowed it. That's not something we used to do, look at each other's meeting reports."
Louise and Jules don't have the same style. She uses few photos in her reports: she wants contractors to read the text. Jules puts in a lot, annotates, redraws. Neither one has aligned to the other.
There doesn't force ICMA to speak with one voice. It makes its methods shareable.
"Your stuff looks sharp."
The document isn't just correct anymore.
"Now I'm actually proud of what I put out."
Several contractors noticed the change.
- "You changed the meeting report format. Your stuff looks sharp."
The public owners responded differently.
- "Really pleasant to read. Very clear."
- "It's readable. It reflects who we are as a firm."
An original use case: Sample tracking
“Now I'm actually proud of what I put out.”
Louise AIMONETTO
ICMA
There, the meeting report goes beyond the job site
Louise uses There for her design-phase meeting reports: residential clients who change their minds, restaurant owners she's tracking through program decisions, clients where budget tradeoffs keep shifting.
"We have way too many disputes with residential clients. They change their minds, that's human. But it needs to be documented, officially on record."
The design-phase meeting report turns a meeting into a formal document. Dated. Traceable. Louise is after the same reflex lawyers have: in the email, please review the attached PDF, and in the PDF, here's what was said.
What Étienne did for construction, Louise now does for design.
"I don't feel locked in."
Louise compares it to tools where everything is trapped inside the vendor's system. With There, the PDFs exist independently, the firm archives them, the history stays accessible.
For a firm already running a dozen software subscriptions, one more tool has to stay light.
"It holds up to the seasonality. We have projects, then no projects. Three people running construction, then six. We never have to ask whether we need to buy another license."
“It holds up to the seasonality. We have projects, then no projects. Three people running construction, then six. We never have to ask whether we need to buy another license.”
Louise AIMONETTO
ICMA
There, ground still to cover
Voice memos haven't become part of her workflow, she doesn't like voice messages, even in her personal life. iPhone photos had sync issues; she wants to try again. Reports still often go out as PDFs by email.
And one irritant comes up every week: a comment applies to multiple contractors, so she copy-pastes the same note into each trade section and swaps out the names. What's missing: items that automatically replicate across the relevant sections, a carry-forward reminder pulled from the previous report, a search through the history to find who said what on which date.
Jules has already structured a submittal tracking table in There: reviewed, not reviewed, pending. Five years from now, when someone asks which tile reference was actually installed, the answer will be there.
Small firms too
Looking at case studies from large firms like Chabanne or Unanime, Louise might have assumed There wasn't built for her.
She thinks the opposite.
"What we love is designing and being on the job site. I think there's a real market with firms of one to eight people."
Small firms are the ones without a technical administrator like Alexandra. The ones who handle their own formatting, their own exports, their own distribution. The ones whose workload swings and who can't commit to fixed per-seat licenses.
"When you see €30 a month, you think: that works. And the model adapts to how we actually operate."
There isn't promising ICMA it will become a large firm. It's helping ICMA produce documents that match what it wants to show the world.
About ICMArchitectures
ICMArchitectures is an architecture firm based in Aix-les-Bains, France. Founded in 2002 by Isabelle Chapuis-Martinez and Étienne Martinez, the firm was taken over in 2024 by Louise Aimonetto and Gauthier Martinez, both licensed architects. The firm works on public facilities, housing, hospitality, and renovation projects throughout Savoie and the French Alps, with a strong focus on local materials and regional craftsmanship. 8 people.
