The Questions That Reveal How a Platform Actually Works

Question 1: When does consultant liability appear in the system?

This is the most important question in any subconsultant management evaluation. The answer tells you immediately whether the platform tracks real-time liability or only records obligations after consultants have asked for payment.

The answer you want: liability accrues at the time of client invoicing, based on the consultant agreements linked to the project phase being billed.

The answer that signals a gap: liability is recorded when a pay request is submitted.

If the answer is the second one, every billing cycle leaves the firm with invisible consultant obligations — committed funds that look like available cash until the pay requests land. For a firm with modest consultant spend and simple project structures, the gap may be manageable. For a firm with significant subconsultant spend across multiple active projects, the software is actively concealing a recurring cash flow risk.

Follow-up: Can you show me the accrued liability view by project before any pay request has been submitted for that phase?

Question 2: Are consultant phases linked to project phases?

Accrual-based liability tracking requires a structural linkage between the consultant agreement and the project phase. Without it, automatic accrual is not possible — the system has no way to know what portion of a client invoice is attributable to which consultant.

Ask the vendor to show you how a consultant agreement is set up in the system and how it is mapped to project phases. If the mapping does not exist — if consultant costs are tracked separately from the project phase structure — automatic accrual is not happening, regardless of what the demo shows.

This linkage also drives downstream functionality. When consultant phases are linked to project phases, the system can automatically apply the correct billing method — pass-through or markup — to each consultant's costs during invoicing, rather than requiring manual entry on each invoice.

Question 3: Can you see the full spread at any moment?

The complete picture of a firm's subconsultant position on any active project requires four numbers:

• What has been billed to the client for consultant work
• What has been accrued as consultant liability based on those billings
• What pay requests have been received and approved
• What has actually been paid to consultants

Ask the vendor to show you a single project view that includes all four. If the platform requires navigating to separate modules, running separate reports, or leaving the project context to see any of these numbers, the visibility is not real-time — it is reconstructed.

A firm that has to reconstruct its financial position from multiple reports is one that will make decisions based on incomplete information between those reconstructions.

Question 4: How are pass-throughs and markups handled on client invoices?

Ask the vendor to show you a client invoice that includes both a professional services fee and a consultant cost — first as a pass-through, then as a markup.

Confirm that the system automatically applies the billing method based on the project setup, rather than requiring manual adjustment on each invoice. Confirm that the pass-through and markup amounts are tracked separately in the project financials and reported differently in the revenue summary.

Ask how the system handles revenue reporting when consultant costs are passed through — does it include the full pass-through amount in the revenue figure, or does it report net revenue excluding pass-throughs? A platform that includes pass-through costs in its revenue reporting is producing a number that overstates the firm's financial performance and distorts every metric calculated against it.

→ Read: Stop Measuring Profit the Wrong Way

Question 5: How does the platform handle pay request review and approval?

Ask to see the pay request workflow — from the moment a pay request is received through approval and payout recording.

Specifically confirm:

• Does the system display the accrued liability for the project phase alongside the submitted pay request amount, so the reviewer can immediately see whether the two align?
• Is there a defined approval workflow with a clear owner, or does the pay request sit in a general queue?
• What happens when a submitted pay request exceeds the accrued liability? Does the system flag it automatically, or does it require the reviewer to catch it manually?
• How is the payout recorded against the project once approved — and does it reduce the accrued liability balance automatically?

A platform that requires the reviewer to manually cross-reference the pay request against a separate liability report is a platform that creates friction and opportunities for error at every approval cycle.

Question 6: How does the platform connect consultant obligations to client collections?

This question tests whether the system treats subconsultant management as a standalone module or as a connected part of the project's financial picture.

Ask the vendor to show you a view that connects the consultant pay requests approved for a project to the client payments received for the same phases. Can the firm see, for any active project, whether consultant obligations are being covered by corresponding client collections — or whether the firm is advancing payment from its own operating cash?

This connection is what separates a subconsultant management module from a complete project financial system. Platforms that track consultant costs in isolation from client billing leave the firm to make the connection manually, which most firms do not do consistently.