Sanso for General Contractors: Supplier and Subcontractor Invoices

The Problem

When you run a general contracting business, money doesn't get lost in your backlog. It gets lost in the flows. On a single project, financial management for a general contractor means juggling ten or so subcontractors, dozens of supplier invoices, progress billings to approve, retainage to track. And client payments that always land later than planned. Every document has to be checked, assigned to the right job, and paid at the right time. Let's be honest: in a small construction business, nobody really has time to do that properly every day.

Two things alone decide whether the business stays healthy. The first is purchase control. On a project, a subcontractor submits a progress billing, a supplier delivers materials, an equipment rental company bills you for a crane. Every time, someone has to verify that the billed amount matches the approved quote, the purchase order, and the actual progress on site. Without that check, you pay overcharges, duplicates, and sometimes the same work twice. The second is payment timing. In construction, the leading cause of business failure isn't a lack of work: it's cash flow gaps on projects. A project that's profitable on paper can still sink the company if it's poorly financed along the way. I'm Amalia Bercot, co-founder and CEO of Sanso, and that's exactly the work we set out to take off general contractors' shoulders.

Sanso, AI-Powered Financial Management for General Contractors

Sanso is an AI-powered financial management service. Put plainly: the AI does the work. It captures your supplier and subcontractor invoices, checks them before payment, prepares and sends your client invoices at the right time, follows up with the ones who are slow to pay, reconciles your bank transactions, and keeps your profitability up to date, project by project. Nothing like construction billing software you'd have to learn between two site meetings. It's a service that does the work for you.

Another point that matters: no new platform to learn. Sanso plugs into the tools you already use (your accounting software like Pennylane, your bank like Qonto, your inbox, your Excel) and the AI handles the rest in the background. The results show up directly in your own tools. And talking to us works like calling in a site manager for backup: by email or WhatsApp, in plain language.

The idea fits in one sentence. You delegate the financial control and tracking of your projects, the AI takes it all on continuously, and you keep your hands on what really matters: building and running your job sites.

Key Capabilities

The AI Checks Your Supplier and Subcontractor Invoices

For a general contractor, this is the make-or-break issue, and it's where Sanso really pulls its weight. Before any payment, Sanso's AI reviews every supplier invoice and every subcontractor progress billing: it matches the billed amount against the approved quote and the purchase order, spots progress discrepancies, detects duplicates, and checks the VAT. A crane billed for a month when the PO called for two weeks, a subcontractor billing past the signed contract, the same work invoiced twice under two different labels: the AI sees it before you pay. So you stop paying overcharges nobody had time to verify.

The AI Captures Every Invoice, Across All Channels

No more chasing invoices for materials, equipment rental, and subcontracting. Sanso's AI collects them for you wherever they arrive. It reads your inbox and extracts the actual invoices, filtering out quotes, delivery notes, and sales reminders along the way. It connects to supplier portals to download the ones that are only available online. And it picks up the documents you send on a dedicated WhatsApp channel, like a paper invoice photographed on the job site. It will even chase suppliers and subcontractors on its own when an invoice is missing.

The AI Tracks Your Profitability, Project by Project

To know whether a project is profitable, every expense has to be assigned to the right job, even when a single supplier invoice covers several jobs at once. Sanso's AI reads each document, understands what it's about, and allocates it to the right project or cost center. Including when a document mixes several job sites or the descriptions don't quite line up. Your job costing finally becomes usable day to day, without a single entry on your part. The result: you see, project by project, where you're making money and where things are slipping, while there's still time to act.

The AI Issues Your Progress Billings and Tracks Your Retainage

A project is never just one invoice. It's a deposit, progress billings to submit at the right pace, change orders to price along the way, a final invoice, then retainage to release once the punch list is cleared. Sanso's AI works from your contracts and quotes to prepare each client invoice at the right time and for the right amount, and to spot what's been done but not yet billed. In small companies, about 5% of invoices simply never get created: the work is done, but nobody thought to invoice it. At construction contract amounts, that oversight costs dearly. With Sanso, it doesn't happen anymore.

The AI Chases Your Client Payments for You

Getting paid on time, in construction, is what separates a profitable project from one that drags your cash flow down. Sanso's AI runs personalized, multichannel collections (email, SMS, phone). Not just a stream of automated reminders. If a project owner disputes a progress billing or flags an error, the case is picked up end to end, all the way to payment. You stop playing debt collector with your clients, and your cash flow no longer depends on you finding time to follow up.

The AI Reconciles Your Accounts in Real Time

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, and what's overdue. No more ticking off payments by hand on Sunday nights. It even handles the cases classic automatic matching drops: labels that don't match, amount differences, date gaps between a progress billing and its payment, partial payments.

AI Supervised by Humans

Everything Sanso does runs on an AI that learns how your business 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. That's the whole difference.

Why General Contractors Choose Sanso

• Your purchases are checked. Every supplier and subcontractor invoice is matched against the quote and the purchase order before payment. No more overcharges and duplicates slipping through unnoticed.
• You stay on top of every project. Every expense is assigned to the right job, and you see in real time which projects pay off and which are going off track.
• Your cash flow can breathe. Progress billings, deposits, and retainage are invoiced at the right time, and late payments are chased without delay.
• No new tool to learn. Sanso works inside your existing tools. No construction billing software to pick up, no interface to tame.
• No commitment. You start when you want, you stop when you want. No HR risk, no hiring to run.

How It Works

1. Onboarding. In a few days, we plug into your existing tools (accounting, bank, email, Excel), without disrupting your job sites.
2. Takeover. The AI gets to work: capturing and checking supplier and subcontractor invoices, issuing progress billings, following up with clients, reconciling accounts. All within the scope you hand over.
3. Your rules. You set what matters: which discrepancies to block before payment, how often to submit progress billings, which clients to handle with care, which approvals stay in your hands before an invoice goes out or a subcontractor gets paid.
4. Continuous work. The AI runs 24/7, no days off, no weather delays. Nothing piles up, nothing falls through the cracks.
5. Your visibility. Everything lands in your own tools, and you write to us by email or WhatsApp whenever you need.

The Results You Can Expect

Control, first. Every supplier and subcontractor invoice is verified before payment, which eliminates overcharges, duplicates, and work billed twice. On projects where purchases make up most of the budget, that's margin recovered.

Then, cash flow under control. Progress billings issued on time, retainage tracked, late payments chased without delay, bank reconciliation permanently up to date. In short, visibility on each project's cash that managing on the fly simply doesn't allow.

And a real read on your profitability. Project by project, you know what works and what doesn't. Enough to price your next bids with the right numbers in hand, instead of gut feel.

Getting Started

If checking supplier and subcontractor invoices keeps falling behind, if you don't really know which projects are profitable, or if cash gets tighter project after project, let's talk. In a few days, Sanso plugs into your tools and the AI takes over the whole job, from purchase control through to payment collection. The easiest way to see what it would look like for your business is to book a call with our team.