Consultancies live on thin margins. Client fees are fixed or hourly. Your overheads are also fixed. The only thing you can actually control is how much you spend on a project before you bill it. Yet most professional services firms don't have a view of their project cost management until month-end.
The issue is the delay. When expense reports arrive weeks after spend happens, when invoices land in inboxes instead of a central system, when project codes get forgotten or mixed up – your finance team spends hours every month-end reconciling, reclassifying and chasing receipts instead of protecting margin.
By then, it's too late. You've already undercharged the client. You've already taken the margin hit.
The thing is, the way your teams spend is how you have to operate: flexibly, fast and across locations. So, what’s the solution?
What needs to catch up is your visibility into that spend.
Your teams are spending money every day: flights, hotels, meals, tools, subcontractors, software licenses (to name a few). Each transaction should flow immediately to a project code so your finance team can see, in real time, whether that project is staying within budget or creeping into loss.
Instead, here’s what actually happens…
Most consultancies rely on email expense reports submitted at the end of the month or quarter. For example, an employee flies to a client site, books the hotel on a corporate card or personal card, files the receipt, submits it via email or a PDF form, and then it sits in someone's inbox until reconciliation week.
The transaction might be coded to the wrong project. It might be coded to a client instead of a project code. It might not be coded at all, forcing finance to figure it out weeks later.
By the time the data lands in your accounting system, two critical things have already happened:
You’ve lost visibility into project profitability. You don't know if that high-touch client engagement is actually profitable until the project closes.
You’ve missed the window to bill it. Most professional services firms operate on monthly or quarterly billing cycles. If your spend data arrives weeks after month-end, it's too late to include it in the current invoice. So it either goes unbilled (and eaten as a cost) or it lands on next month's invoice, looking like a correction instead of a legitimate charge.
The client then sees a bill they weren’t expecting, which inevitably causes tension. Meanwhile, your finance team is pulled into tracing missing receipts and working out the correct project codes, sometimes stretching month-end reconciliation time into weeks.
So, what changes when you move to real-time project cost control?
Every transaction is tagged to a project the moment it happens. An employee taps their Pleo card, or snaps a receipt, and selects the project code in the same motion. The transaction flows into your system and finance sees spend accruing to a project as it happens.
This creates three immediate wins:
You capture every billable cost before you invoice. When spend lands in real time, your finance team bills what was actually spent, meaning margin stays in your business instead of bleeding into the client relationship.
You see project profitability before it's too late. A high-touch engagement starts draining margin? You can see it in week two, not week six. You can adjust scope, tighten resource allocation, or escalate it before the project closes at a loss.
You bill faster and cleaner. With project-level spend data, your finance team builds invoices from a central source of truth instead of chasing emails and receipts. Invoices go out on time and clients see a clear project audit trail.
Koto, a London-based brand consultancy with 100+ people across four cities, faced a different kind of chaos. Before Pleo, their expense process involved six people: one to approve, another to chase missing receipts, and someone to process reimbursements.
Receipts went missing (about half of them). Finance spent hours chasing details. Employees felt uncomfortable spending what they needed to do their jobs.
“Now [with Pleo], we only have two people involved: the user and someone in finance who accounts for it. Processing all expenses only takes one day, for one person, per week. Whereas before, cumulative hours across six people were at least double this.” Caroline Matthews, COO and Founder @ Koto
On the other hand, New Flag, a European beauty brand builder with ~300 employees, was dealing with their expense management process being entirely manual and paper-based. As you can imagine, this was forcing finance to chase receipts from their travelling sales team instead of running strategy.
Once they had live and centralised spend tracking with Pleo, they cut expense-management admin by 60%, even as they scaled into new countries and added more entities.
"Pleo is a game changer, and I don't say that lightly. It's made us so much more efficient, and that's what modern finance comes down to: doing more and being less of a burden on the rest of the company." Patrick Hofer, CFO @ New Flag
If you're looking at tools or processes to improve project profitability, look for three things:
Clarity and efficiency: Every transaction is tagged to a project at the point of spend so reconciliation shifts from weeks of detective work to hours of review.
Flexibility and control: Your team can spend freely and when they do, spend immediately flows into project codes, giving you control over project profitability.
Visibility and ownership: Everyone from partners to project managers can see in real time what a project is costing.
Client engagements will always come with surprises, whether it’s scope changes, last-minute travel or unexpected consultant time. But your spend shouldn’t be one of them.
It’s time to lay the groundwork for clear, real-time spend control with modern tools built for the way firms work today.
With Pleo in place, better spend management becomes more than just a way to reduce admin. It becomes the foundation for protecting margins you’ve earned, catching scope creep early and making smarter pricing decisions.
To see how Pleo can transform your business, learn more.