Sanso for Agencies: Invoicing and Cash Flow Under Control
Sanso handles accounts payable, supplier invoice capture, and payment tracking for marketing agencies so founders can stop playing bookkeeper and get back to running their business.
The Problem for Agencies
In a communications, marketing, or web agency, agency financial management is a puzzle that redraws itself every month. One client is on a monthly retainer. Another pays by project. A third works on a time-and-materials basis. You front media buys and expenses that you rebill later, you juggle a small army of freelancers and contractors, and someone still has to chase late payments without ruffling clients you intend to keep. I'm Amalia Bercot, co-founder and CEO of Sanso, and that's exactly the work our AI-powered service takes on.
Do your project managers spend too many hours on finance admin?
Sanso hands invoicing, freelancer tracking, and payment follow-up to AI, so your teams stay on the campaigns.
Book a callIn an agency, your team's time is the product. Every hour spent building an invoice, checking a freelancer's bill, or running after a payment is an hour that doesn't go to clients. And the most awkward part: the person chasing the payment is often the account director who sold the engagement. An uncomfortable position that mixes the relationship with the money. The result: follow-ups drag, delivered work goes unbilled, and cash flow tightens.
Add to that the lack of visibility. Without an up-to-date view of client profitability, it's hard to say which account actually pays off once you subtract the team's days, the media costs you've fronted, and what subcontractors cost. The agency steers by gut feel, even though the data exists. It's just scattered all over the place: in emails, quotes, bank statements, the accounting tool.
Sanso, AI-Powered Agency Financial Management
Sanso is an AI-powered agency financial management service. The AI is the engine that gets through the work: it creates and sends your invoices, captures and validates your freelancers' invoices, rebills the expenses you front, runs collections, and reconciles your accounts in real time. Not software you operate yourself, but a service that takes over the operations for you.
No new platform to learn. Sanso's AI works in the background, inside the tools your agency already uses: your accounting tool like Pennylane, your bank like Qonto, your Google Workspace, your CRM. The results land in your own tools, and you talk to our team the way you'd talk to a trusted partner, by email or WhatsApp.
The idea fits in one sentence: you delegate the agency's finance operations, the AI handles them continuously, and your teams stay on the campaigns.
The Financial Challenges Specific to Agencies
Agency Invoicing That Changes with Every Client
An agency rarely bills two clients the same way. Monthly retainer, fixed-price project, days sold, milestone billing, rebilled expenses: every contract comes with its own rules. Agency client invoicing means getting the right invoice out at the right time, without missing a delivered service or a half-spent budget. A level of rigor that, honestly, nobody has time to maintain between two deliveries.
Expenses and Media Buys to Rebill
Agencies front a lot of money on their clients' behalf: media buys, licenses, production costs, outside services. Those expenses come in through every channel and have to be matched to the right client to be rebilled to the cent. As soon as the tracking is done by hand, expenses slip through the cracks. That's margin evaporating.
Freelancers and Subcontractors Everywhere
Communications, marketing, and web agencies run on a crowd of outside contributors: graphic designers, developers, copywriters, media buyers, one-off contractors. Their invoices land on any date, through any channel, and each one has to be tied to the right budget to know what each client really costs. Without that tracking, client profitability stays a guessing game.
Collections That Put the Account Director in an Awkward Spot
In an agency, the person managing the relationship is often the same one who has to chase the client for payment. Asking for money from someone you hope will sign the next campaign is delicate, so the follow-ups drag. Payment terms stretch, cash flow takes the hit, and the money owed ends up weighing on the relationship.
Cash Flow Under Pressure
Weeks can pass between producing the campaign and getting paid. And when the agency has already fronted the media costs and paid its freelancers, that gap becomes a real risk. Invoices that go out late and half-hearted follow-ups only dig the hole deeper.
What Sanso's AI Takes On
Steering client profitability by gut feel?
Sanso's AI ties every expense to the right budget and reconciles your accounts continuously, for a clear view of what each client brings in.
Book a callThe AI Creates and Sends Your Invoices
Sanso's AI spots when a piece of work has been delivered and needs to be invoiced, then draws up the invoice according to each client's specific terms. It also combs through quotes to flush out the ones that haven't been fully invoiced, and follows up when needed. The goal: no invoice falls through the cracks -- in small businesses, nearly 5% of invoices are simply never created.
The AI Captures Freelancer Invoices and Rebills Expenses
The AI fetches your freelancer and contractor invoices wherever they land: it reads your inbox and extracts the real invoices, plugs into supplier portals, and picks up documents sent to a dedicated WhatsApp channel. It reads them, hunts down duplicates, checks them against the quote, then ties each expense to the right client. Fronted expenses and media buys to rebill are flagged and linked to the right budget, without a single entry on your side.
The AI Runs Collections for You
The AI runs personalized, multichannel agency collections (email, SMS, phone), not a dumb blast of automated reminders. If a client disputes an amount, the case is checked against the quote and handled end to end, all the way to payment. Above all, the account director who manages the relationship no longer has to take on the thankless role of chasing their own client. Finance and the client relationship are finally decoupled.
The AI Reconciles Your Accounts and Clarifies Your Cash Flow
For every bank transaction, the AI finds the matching purchase or sales invoice and updates its status. At any moment, you know who has paid, what's pending, what's overdue -- all without any manual matching. You get visibility into your cash flow and each client's profitability that you simply didn't have before.
AI Supervised by Humans
Everything runs on an AI that learns how your agency works over the months. But on sensitive matters, it never works alone: our operators supervise, handle exceptions, and settle the tricky cases. Between 80% and 99% of the work is automated, with 100% reliability.
How It Works
- Onboarding. In a few days, the AI plugs into your existing tools (accounting, bank, CRM, Google Workspace), without disrupting the agency's work.
- The takeover. The AI starts invoicing your services, capturing freelancer invoices, rebilling expenses, collecting overdue payments, and reconciling your accounts, within the scope you hand over.
- Your rules. You set what matters: invoicing terms per client, accounts to handle with care, follow-up thresholds, approvals you want to keep before an invoice or a payment goes out.
- Continuous work. The AI runs 24/7, with no vacations and no sick days. Nothing piles up, nothing slips through.
- Your visibility. Everything shows up in your own tools, and you write to our team by email or WhatsApp whenever the need comes up.
The Results You Can Expect
Time back for your teams. The hours spent building invoices, checking freelancer bills, and chasing clients go back where they create value: the campaigns.
Cash flow under control. Services get invoiced with nothing missed, expenses rebilled to the cent, overdue invoices collected without hesitation, and bank reconciliation stays permanently up to date. You steer profitability client by client, instead of guessing at it.
No hiring risk. No finance hire to recruit and manage, no service interruption during vacations. The monthly retainer runs from $300 to $2,000 depending on your volume of operations, with no per-transaction billing, and there's no commitment: you stop whenever you like.
Getting Started
If invoicing, freelancer tracking, and payment follow-up are eating into your teams' time or falling on your account directors, let's talk. In a few days, Sanso's AI plugs into your tools and takes over your agency's financial management, from invoice to payment. To see what that would look like at your agency, the simplest step is to book a call with our team.