From invoices to insights
Your most underused data source for consulting management
Every consulting engagement generates invoices. Most companies process them for payment - approving against budget, coding to cost centres - but don't extract the insight locked inside them. The team composition, the rates, the work descriptions that tell you whether you're getting what you paid for.
But invoices contain far more information than most organisations ever extract from them. They're a detailed record of what you're actually buying - and whether it matches what you thought you were buying.
What's actually in an invoice
A typical consulting invoice tells you:
- Who's working: Names, roles, and seniority levels of the team billing time
- What they're doing: Descriptions of work performed, often mapped to project phases
- What it costs: Day rates, hours worked, expenses claimed
- When it happened: Time periods covered, billing cycles
Individually, each invoice is just a payment request. Collectively, they tell the story of an entire engagement - and reveal patterns that would otherwise stay hidden.
What you're missing
Without systematic invoice-level analysis, these issues often go unnoticed until they've accumulated:
Seniority drift: Partners sold the deal, but Associates are doing the work. If you're paying Partner rates (£3,000/day) but getting Manager delivery (£1,500/day equivalent), on a 6-month engagement that's £150k+ of value you're not receiving.
Rate inconsistencies: The same seniority level billed at different rates across engagements. Without comparison, you don't know which rate is the outlier.
The consultant who lingers: Particularly common in IT. The implementation is "complete," but the consultant stays on extension after extension, doing nice-to-have work that was never in the original scope. Each month seems small, but over a year it's substantial.
Scope expansion hiding in plain sight: Invoices that don't match the original SOW phases. New line items appearing that weren't in the agreement.
The problem: connecting the dots
Invoices arrive as disconnected documents. Invoice #4521 from Deloitte in March might be related to Invoice #4892 in June and Invoice #5103 in September. They're all part of the same transformation programme, but nothing explicitly links them.
Manually piecing this together is painful: different formats from different suppliers, inconsistent project references, multiple billing entities for the same engagement. So most companies don't bother. They track at the supplier level, not the engagement level. They can tell you how much they paid McKinsey last year, but not whether the digital strategy is on budget.
How leading companies approach this
The companies that get this right do a few things differently:
- Engagement-level tracking: Every invoice is tagged to a specific engagement, not just a supplier or cost code
- Rate benchmarking: Systematic comparison of rates across engagements to spot outliers. A large manufacturer benchmarked rates and delivery across their portfolio and found smaller consultancies consistently outperforming name-brand firms at lower cost - insight that only emerged from comparing data across engagements
- Team composition monitoring: Checking that the seniority mix matches what was sold
- Extension scrutiny: Treating every extension as a new decision, not a default continuation
The challenge is that doing this manually requires dedicated resources that most procurement teams don't have.
How Scopecreeper uses invoices
We built Scopecreeper around the insight that invoices are the most reliable source of consulting data. Nobody forgets to send one.
When you upload invoices, our AI:
- Reads the content: Not just the total, but line items, rates, team members, and work descriptions
- Groups into engagements: Automatically connects invoices that belong to the same project
- Surfaces patterns: Highlights rate variances, seniority mismatches, and spending anomalies
- Tracks over time: Shows how engagements evolve - including the ones that should have ended but didn't
The result: engagement-level intelligence built from documents you already have.