In professional services, we’ve always known that the biggest costs aren’t always the most obvious.
They don’t show up clearly in a line item or a vendor invoice. Instead, they hide in the day-to-day: in unbillable hours, delayed approvals, duplicated tools, and under quoting because of gaps in understanding true costs.
And by the time we catch these issues? It’s often too late to course-correct.
Leaders across law firms, consultancies, architecture studios, and creative agencies concur with this and the theme is always the same.
Margins are getting tighter, project scopes are shifting faster with a growing list of expected deliverables.
The irony actually is most of these firms have sophisticated talent and tight delivery standards.
But when it comes to tracking and managing spend, they’re often stuck with tools that haven’t evolved with the business — and this is where AI spend management solutions are becoming increasingly vital.
Many still rely on a patchwork of spreadsheets, manual workflows, and email threads to track spend.
Often, they miss the analytics that help translate costs to the correct quotes, which keep the profits and losses at a healthy balance for projects.
Hidden costs can quietly chip away at profitability.
The Real Cost of Not Knowing
While consultancy projects are typically quoted with an upfront fee, costs can quietly rise as the project scope expands.
These additional charges often go unrecorded or unnoticed, leading to hidden expenses that clients may not anticipate.
This could snowball into significant challenges when there isn’t a strong documentation process.
Then there’s decentralised spending. Creative agencies have had cases where three departments were paying for similar design tools under separate accounts.
Not a malicious act but it comes simply from a lack of overall visibility.
But it translates into thousands of dollars wasted on redundant subscriptions.
Problems like this can also occur for areas of unplanned spending, such as transportation to sites, printing, and even something as simple as bills from client meetings that happen off-site at cafes or restaurants.
It’s easy to lose track of how much is being spent without a birds eye view of all expenditure.
Slow, manual approval chains also create friction.
At law firms, finance teams spent days every month chasing department heads to approve recurring research tools — unnecessary delays and mounting admin costs.
And perhaps most common: project teams are often left guessing whether they’re on track budget-wise.
Without real-time views into actual vs projected spend, teams can’t flag overruns until it’s too late.
Just like architecture firms that reach out to us when they realise that they blew past budget on major projects due to unchecked site visits and freelance costs.
This also makes it harder to plan cashflow, especially when upfront payments to contractors are involved.
If firms can’t predict spend, they won’t know when to collect from clients, and that can quickly lead to cashflow crunches.
Our Tools Haven’t Caught Up
Maybe the scenarios above sound all too familiar to you and your company.
The truth is, professional services teams are still relying on tools that were built for a slower world.
Spend management today is still a reactive process in a lot of companies.
Spreadsheets, legacy finance systems, and disjointed approval flows that are not designed to handle today’s pace or complexity is a risk, for both profitability and compliance.
The Quiet, But Necessary Support
When people hear “AI-powered spend management,” they often imagine something overwhelming.
Think complicated dashboards, cryptic settings, and tools that only data experts can navigate. It sounds more like science fiction than something a finance team would actually use. But that’s not the case.
At Summit, we’ve built AI tools that do the heavy lifting in the background.
From auto-capturing invoice data to flagging out-of-policy claims, everything is designed to be intuitive and practical.
No steep learning curve, no tech jargon—just smarter workflows, faster approvals, and real-time insights that finance teams can act on..
For instance, Summit provides visibility into spending at individual vendor level.
So if multiple teams are unknowingly paying for similar SaaS subscriptions under different accounts, finance teams can spot unusually high spend and take steps to consolidate, potentially saving thousands annually with AI spend management insights.
Project-level cost visibility also makes Summit’s AI a great ally.
Instead of waiting for month-end reports, teams can track actual vs forecasted spend live.
Several moving parts can be seen in one dashboard so that any overruns or out-of-pocket costs are accounted for in real time and not left to collect dust in the finance backlogs.
The software also allows teams to take proactive steps when project spending nears set thresholds, rather than scrambling to cut costs only after the budget’s been blown.
It’s smarter cost control, with fewer surprises.
With all transactions tracked at the project and customer level, finance teams also gain deeper insight into profit and loss.
Over time, this data helps them refine costing and improve quotation accuracy for future projects too.
The teams can appropriately price its services or prevent themselves from taking on unsustainable projects that eat into margins.
Strategic Clarity is Better Than Cost Control Without Vision
With tools like Summit, the end goal isn’t just to “cut costs.”
It’s to help firms understand their spending deeply enough to make smarter decisions.
To have confidence when bidding for a new project. Reallocate budgets and resources with purpose. The bottom line is to spend better, not less.
This is more than about giving finance teams a higher level of control.
Even on a higher level, leadership teams get the kind of clarity that lets them act with foresight, not hindsight.
Because in professional services, control doesn’t come from just about the numbers, but rather from knowing the full story behind them.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by HobieArt via Freepik
