Procurement outsourcing for professional services firms

No. We work behind the firm, not in front of it. We prepare what a recharge needs — coded costs, receipts, contract references — and your team sends it. Your clients do not know we exist unless you choose to tell them.

Yes, and it is the single most valuable thing we do here. One invoice can carry billable project work, non-billable rework and travel. We split it by line, code each part to the right engagement and cost type, and flag anything that looks recoverable but is missing the evidence a client will ask for.

Rate cards are held as data against each supplier and engagement — grade, rate, effective dates, any cap or mark-up rule. Every line is checked against them before approval routing, and a breach becomes an exception with the contract reference attached, so the conversation with the supplier is factual rather than approximate.

Yes. Rules vary by client contract — coach airfare only, per-diem caps, no mark-up on pass-through, receipts required above a threshold — and we hold them per client rather than as one firm-wide policy. Costs that breach a rule are flagged before they reach a client invoice rather than after it is queried.

By working the deadline rather than the receipt. Recoverable costs are tracked against each client's submission window, chased before it closes, and reported weekly with anything at risk of falling outside it. Most unrecovered disbursement is not disputed — it is simply late.

Yes: insurance certificates, right-to-work, NDAs, conflict checks and employment-status documentation collected, filed where your auditors expect them, and diarised for renewal. We collect and chase; your team makes every status determination, because that is a legal judgement and not an administrative one.

Either a price per transaction — per invoice, expense claim or purchase order — or a monthly fee for a dedicated analyst. Both models are on the table from the first call. We quote after the free audit, because the honest number depends on your volumes, your systems and how many transactions need exception work. Anyone quoting before seeing that is guessing.

Compare your fully loaded cost per invoice, expense claim or purchase order against the quote. Fully loaded means salaries, benefits, overhead, software and the hours your finance and practice staff spend chasing. The free audit measures your current figure, so the comparison is your number against ours rather than a benchmark against a brochure.

We say up front rather than at renewal. Setup and process documentation sit inside the fixed-fee pilot. Ongoing fees cover the agreed scope and volume band. Anything outside it — a new entity, a new system, a large one-off backlog — is quoted separately before work starts.

Four to six weeks from first conversation to a team running live work. Roughly two weeks for the audit, then a fixed-fee pilot, then steady state. Your side of the work is a data extract, one named contact, scoped system access and your approval rules.

NetSuite, Deltek, Sage Intacct, Xero, QuickBooks, Certinia and Kantata, plus the time-and-expense systems alongside them. We work inside your system rather than asking your team to learn ours, so there is no migration and no new licence. Where you run more than one — usually after an acquisition — we work in each and map both to one classification for group reporting.

Access is scoped by you, granted to named individuals and revoked through your own leaver process. We contract on standard clauses, name every sub-processor, and work to GDPR, UK GDPR, PIPEDA, the Australian Privacy Principles and Saudi PDPL. ISO 27001 alignment is in progress and SOC 2 Type II is on the roadmap. We state certification status as it is rather than showing badges we do not hold.

Delivery is from India and the Middle East, and we say so plainly rather than burying it. Your data stays in your systems — we work inside them rather than copying data out. Where a copy is unavoidable, the storage region is written into the DPA, and we support UK IDTA and EU standard contractual clauses for transfers to India.

ISO 27001 or SOC 2 Type II, then two follow-up questions most providers dodge: which legal entity is certified, and what the audit scope actually covers. A badge on a website tells you nothing without those two answers. Ask us the same questions.

Duplicate detection runs before approval routing. Any change to a supplier's bank details is treated as an exception, never actioned by us, and escalated to your nominated contact for out-of-band verification. The analyst who maintains supplier master data is never the analyst who processes that supplier's invoices.

No. We prepare and route; you approve and release. Nobody on our side can move money or authorise a payment, and your delegation of authority stays exactly as it is.

Named analysts assigned to your account, with named backup cover for leave and absence. You know who does the work and who to call. Cover is a contractual term, not something you find out about when someone is on holiday.

Turnaround time, accuracy and exception-closure rates are agreed during the pilot against your measured baseline, then reported monthly. Remedies for a sustained miss are written into the contract rather than left to goodwill, and either side can exit on notice if the numbers do not hold.

Most clients redeploy them onto engagement profitability, panel negotiation and the recovery work nobody has time for rather than cutting headcount. We will tell you honestly what your volume supports instead of promising a headcount number to win the work.

You keep the SOPs and process documentation, because they are yours throughout, and your data never leaves your systems. Transition-out support is written into the contract from day one rather than negotiated at the point you want to leave.

When your subcontractor volume is low enough that one finance manager sees every invoice, or when nearly all your cost is payroll rather than third party. We will say so on the first call. A pilot that fails costs us more than a deal we decline.

Subcontractor and supplier invoice volumes, how much is coded to the right engagement, rate-card exceptions, and disbursements recovered against those written off. You get a written baseline you keep whether or not you go further, and it is the number every later comparison is made against — including ours.