Sanso for Consulting Firms: Automated Invoicing and Finance

The Problem for Consulting Firms

Consulting firm financial management looks simple from a distance. It isn't. Fees change from one engagement to the next: fixed fee here, time and materials there, sometimes a success fee. For every client you have to issue the right invoice based on what was negotiated, track expenses that scatter across freelancers and subcontractors, and chase overdue payments without ruffling anyone. I'm Amalia Bercot, co-founder and CEO of Sanso, and that's exactly the work our AI-powered service takes over.

In a consulting firm, billable time is the product. Every hour spent putting together a fee invoice, checking off vendor bills, or running after a payment is an hour that doesn't go to the engagement. Worse: it's often the partner who sold the engagement who ends up chasing the client for payment. An uncomfortable position, one that mixes the work and the money. So follow-ups drag, invoices fall through the cracks, and cash flow tightens.

Add to that the lack of visibility. Without up-to-date project accounting, good luck knowing which engagement is actually profitable once you subtract consultant days and subcontractor costs. The firm 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 Financial Management for Consulting Firms

Sanso is a financial management service for consulting firms, powered by AI. The AI is the engine that gets through the work: it creates and sends your fee invoices, captures and validates your subcontractors' invoices, runs collections, and reconciles your accounts in real time. Not software you operate yourself. A service that takes the 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, your CRM. The results show up in your own tools, and you talk to our team the way you would with a trusted provider, by email or WhatsApp.

The idea fits in one sentence: you delegate the firm's day-to-day finance operations, the AI handles them continuously, and your consultants stay on client work.

The Financial Challenges Unique to Consulting

Invoicing That Changes with Every Engagement

A consulting firm rarely bills two clients the same way. Fixed fee, sold days, milestone payments, progress billing, success-fee clauses: every contract has its own rules. Issuing the right invoice at the right time, without missing a completed piece of work or a quote that's only half invoiced, takes a discipline nobody has time to maintain between two deliverables.

Expenses Scattered Across Freelancers and Subcontractors

Consulting runs heavily on external contributors: independent experts, subcontractors, one-off vendors. Their invoices arrive through every channel, on any date, and each one has to be tied to the right engagement to know what each project really costs. Without that tracking, per-engagement profitability stays guesswork.

Collections That Put the Partner in an Awkward Position

In a consulting firm, the person who sells the engagement is often the same person who has to chase the client for payment. Asking for money from someone you hope to keep working with is delicate, so the follow-ups drag. Payment delays stretch, cash flow takes the hit, and the money owed ends up weighing on the relationship.

Cash Flow Under Pressure

Weeks can go by between delivering an engagement and getting paid. When invoices go out late and follow-ups are half-hearted, the gap widens further. For a firm that fronts its consultants' days and pays its subcontractors, that cash flow hole is a real risk.

What Sanso's AI Handles

The AI Creates and Sends Your Fee Invoices

Sanso's AI spots when a piece of work is finished and ready to bill, then creates the invoice based on each engagement'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: not a single fee invoice gets forgotten, when in small businesses nearly 5% of invoices simply never get created.

The AI Captures and Categorizes Subcontractor Invoices

The AI fetches your freelancers' and vendors' invoices wherever they land: it reads your inbox and extracts the actual 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 quote, then ties each expense to the right engagement. Your project accounting by client and by engagement becomes usable, without a single entry on your side.

The AI Runs Collections for You

The AI runs personalized, multichannel collections for your consulting firm (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 until the payment lands. Above all, the partner who sold the engagement no longer has to take on the thankless job 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 fee invoice and updates its status. At any moment you know who has paid, what's pending, and what's overdue, without any manual checking. You get visibility into your cash flow and into each engagement's profitability that you didn't have until now.

AI Supervised by Humans

It all rests on an AI that learns how your firm operates 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

1. Onboarding. In a few days, the AI plugs into your existing tools (accounting, bank, CRM, Google Workspace) without disrupting the firm's work.
2. The handover. The AI starts invoicing your fees, capturing subcontractor invoices, collecting overdue payments, and reconciling your accounts, within the scope you delegate to it.
3. Your rules. You set what matters: billing terms per engagement, clients to handle with care, follow-up thresholds, approvals you want to keep before an invoice or a payment goes out.
4. Continuous work. The AI runs 24/7, with no vacations and no sick days. Nothing piles up, nothing falls through the cracks.
5. Your visibility. You find everything in your own tools, and you write to our team by email or WhatsApp whenever the need comes up.

The Results You Can Expect

Billable time given back to consultants. The hours spent putting invoices together, checking off vendor bills, and chasing clients go back where they create value: to the engagements.

Cash flow under control. Fees are invoiced with nothing missed, overdue payments are collected without hesitation, and bank reconciliation stays up to date at all times. You manage profitability engagement by engagement, instead of estimating it.

No HR 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 it's commitment-free: you stop whenever you like.

Getting Started

If fee invoicing, subcontractor tracking, and payment follow-ups are eating into your consultants' time or landing on the partners, let's talk. In a few days, Sanso's AI plugs into your tools and takes over your consulting firm's financial management, from fee invoice to payment received. To see what that would look like at your firm in concrete terms, the simplest step is to book a call with our team.