Sanso for Architecture Firms: Fees, Invoices, and Cash Flow

The Problem for Architecture Firms

Financial management for architecture firms has a quirk few other professions share: the money never arrives all at once. An architectural commission stretches over months, sometimes years. Fees, meanwhile, are billed phase by phase, as the work progresses. Between the first sketch and project handover, you have to issue the right fee invoice at the right moment, keep an eye on your engineering consultants' invoices, and chase a project owner who pays when it suits them. I'm Amalia Bercot, co-founder and CEO of Sanso, and that's exactly the work our AI-powered service takes over.

In an architecture firm, the architect's time goes to design, permit applications, site supervision. Not to preparing a fee invoice or double-checking a bill from the energy consultant. Every hour spent on financial admin is an hour taken from the project. And since the phases come one after another, missing just one is enough for a fee installment to be left behind: work done, never billed.

On top of that comes the lack of visibility into architecture project profitability. Between the team's hours, co-consultants' fees, and rebillable expenses, who can really say whether a project was profitable once the building is delivered? The data exists somewhere. The trouble is that it's scattered: across emails, design contracts, bank statements, the accounting tool.

Sanso: AI-Powered Financial Management for Architecture Firms

Sanso is a financial management service for architecture firms, built on AI. The AI is the engine that does the heavy lifting: it prepares and sends your fee invoices, captures and validates your engineering consultants' invoices, runs collections, and reconciles your accounts in real time. It's not software you operate yourself. It's a service that takes financial operations off your hands.

No new platform to learn. Sanso's AI works in the background, inside the tools your firm already uses: your accounting tool like Pennylane, your bank like Qonto, your Google Workspace. Results show up in your own tools, and you talk to our team like you would a trusted partner, by email or WhatsApp.

The idea fits in one sentence: you delegate the firm's financial operations, the AI handles them continuously, and your team stays where it counts, on the projects.

The Financial Challenges Unique to Architecture

Fees Billed Phase by Phase

An architecture firm doesn't bill at the end of the project, but as the commission's phases unfold: concept sketch, preliminary design, detailed design, contractor tendering, site supervision, handover. Each milestone triggers a fee invoice, calculated according to the terms of the design contract. Getting the right amount out at the right stage, without letting a completed phase slip by, takes a discipline nobody really has time to maintain between design deadlines.

Co-Consultant Fees to Track

Architects rarely work alone. Structural, MEP, and energy engineers, cost consultants, surveyors, landscape designers: their fee invoices arrive through every channel, on any date, and each one has to be matched to the right project to know what each job really costs. Without that tracking, architect billing flies blind, and per-project profitability ends up a rough guess.

Collections That Drag On

Project owners, private and public alike, aren't always in a hurry to pay. On public contracts, the delays stretch even longer. And chasing a client you're hoping to win the next commission from is genuinely awkward, so the reminders drag. Unpaid fees pile up, and it's the firm's cash flow that absorbs the gap.

Cash Flow Strained by Long Projects

Months pass between the first sketch and the final payment. The firm fronts its team's work and pays its engineering consultants long before collecting some fee installments. When invoices go out late and follow-ups are soft, the cash flow gap widens, to the point of becoming a real risk for the firm.

What Sanso's AI Takes Over

The AI Prepares and Sends Your Fee Invoices

Sanso's AI spots when a phase is complete and ready to bill, then prepares the fee invoice according to each commission's specific terms. It also combs through contracts to flush out unbilled installments, and follows up when needed. The goal is that no fee ever falls through the cracks, knowing that in small businesses nearly 5% of invoices are simply never created.

The AI Captures and Categorizes Consultant Invoices

The AI goes and finds your co-consultants' and providers' fee invoices wherever they land: it reads your inbox and extracts the real invoices, connects to supplier portals, and picks up documents sent to a dedicated WhatsApp channel. It reads them, hunts down duplicates, checks them against the contract, then assigns each expense to the right project. The result: your project-by-project cost accounting becomes usable, without a single entry keyed in on your side.

The AI Runs Collections for You

The AI runs personalized, multi-channel collections (email, SMS, phone), not a dumb blast of automated reminders. If a project owner disputes an amount, the case is checked against the contract and handled end to end, until payment lands. You no longer have to take on the thankless role of demanding payment from a client you're still working with: finance and the project-owner relationship are finally kept separate.

The AI Reconciles Your Accounts and Clarifies Your Cash Flow

For every bank transaction, the AI finds the matching purchase invoice or fee invoice and updates its status. At any moment, you know who's paid, what's pending, and what's overdue, with zero manual checking. You gain a visibility into your cash flow and architecture project profitability that you didn't have until now.

An AI Supervised by Humans

Everything rests on an AI that learns how your firm works over the months. But on sensitive matters, it never works alone: our operators supervise, manage exceptions, and settle the tricky cases. Between 80% and 99% of the work is automated, for a reliability that stays at 100%.

How It Works

1. Onboarding. Within a few days, the AI connects to your existing tools (accounting, bank, Google Workspace), without disrupting the firm's activity.
2. The takeover. The AI starts billing your fees, capturing consultant invoices, collecting overdue payments, and reconciling your accounts, within the scope you hand over.
3. Your rules. You decide what matters: phased billing terms, project owners to handle with care, reminder thresholds, approvals you want to keep before a fee invoice or a payment goes out.
4. Continuous work. The AI runs 24/7, no vacations, no sick days. Nothing piles up, nothing slips through.
5. Your visibility. Everything shows up in your own tools, and you write to our team by email or WhatsApp whenever the need arises.

The Results You Can Expect

Time given back to design. The hours spent preparing fee invoices, checking engineering consultants' invoices, and chasing project owners go back where they create value: to the projects.

Cash flow under control. Fees are billed at every phase, nothing forgotten, overdue payments are collected without the awkwardness, and bank reconciliation stays up to date at all times. You steer profitability project by project, rather than estimating it after the fact.

No HR risk. No finance hire to recruit and manage, no service interruption during vacations. Monthly plans run 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 fee billing, consultant invoice tracking, and payment follow-ups are eating into your design time, or always landing back on your plate, let's talk. Within a few days, Sanso's AI connects to your tools and takes over your architecture firm's financial management, from fee invoicing through to incoming payment. To see what that would look like concretely at your firm, the simplest step is to book a call with our team.