Your team billed 400 hours across six client engagements last month. But the expense report says $12,000 was spent on “travel and entertainment” with no client attribution. Which engagements are profitable and which are losing money? You will not know until someone spends half a day reconstructing the allocations.
Consulting firms live and die by utilisation and profitability. Every hour a consultant spends on expense reports is an hour not billed to a client. Every expense that cannot be attributed to a specific engagement makes profitability reporting unreliable.
Why expense management breaks down in consulting
Client entertainment has no attribution at purchase. A consultant takes a prospect to dinner on the shared card. Three weeks later, nobody remembers which engagement it relates to. The expense gets coded to “general” and the client profitability report is inaccurate.
Travel expenses create reimbursement queues. Consultants travelling to client sites pay for flights, hotels, and meals out of pocket. Claims are submitted when convenient, not when the expense occurs. The finance team processes a backlog of stale claims every fortnight.
Multiple engagements blur cost boundaries. A consultant working across three clients in one week buys a research subscription, prints a report, and pays for parking at two different client offices. Without attribution at the point of purchase, cost allocation becomes guesswork.
Expense reports consume billable time. The Budgetly CFO Survey (March 2026) found that 49.1% of finance leaders say manual tasks consume 40% or more of their team’s time. For consulting firms where every hour has a billable rate, that administrative burden directly reduces revenue.
What replaces the manual process
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Shared firm card with no client attribution | Individual cards per consultant with engagement-linked budgets |
| Reimbursements submitted weeks after travel | Card issued before the trip, spend tracked automatically |
| Client entertainment coded to “general” | Transaction tagged to engagement at point of purchase |
| Profitability reports based on estimates | Accurate cost allocation from real-time data |
| Monthly expense reports consuming billable hours | Zero expense reports, receipts captured in 10 seconds |
| Manual reconciliation in Xero | Automatic sync with transactions pre-coded to clients |
How it works in practice
Engagement-linked budgets. Each client engagement gets its own budget with spending limits by category. Travel, entertainment, research, and materials each have their own allocation. The finance team sees spend against budget in real time for every active engagement.
Individual cards for every consultant. Each team member gets their own Visa debit card. When they switch between engagements, they tag the transaction to the correct client in the app. No shared cards, no reimbursements, no expense reports.
Receipt capture that takes 10 seconds. The mobile app prompts a receipt photo after each transaction. Buddy AI extracts the details, matches it to the transaction, and codes it to the correct engagement. Consultants never fill out an expense report again.
Pre-transaction controls. Engagement budgets are enforced before money leaves. If a client engagement has a $5,000 travel budget and $4,800 has been spent, the next booking either fits within the remaining $200 or requires partner approval to increase the budget.
Results from consulting businesses
Bennett and Bennett, operating across consulting and professional services, replaced their spreadsheet-based expense process:
“We erased spreadsheets and saved a full day in admin each month.”
Bennett and Bennett
For consulting firms billing at $200-$500 per hour, a full day of recovered admin time per month represents $1,600-$4,000 in billable capacity returned to the business.
The pattern across consulting firms is consistent: practices that replace shared cards and reimbursements with individual cards and engagement-linked budgets recover significant administrative time while gaining accurate client profitability data they never had before.
Getting started
Most consulting firms complete the transition within 14 days:
- Set up engagement-linked budgets with category spending limits
- Issue individual Visa debit cards to consultants and partners
- Brief the team on the card and receipt capture app (10 minutes)
- Connect to Xero for automatic transaction sync
- Stop the shared card and reimbursement process
For the full consulting feature set, visit the consulting expense management solution page. To see how engagement-linked budgets work, watch the demo.
