Modern Treasury vs Trovata for Architecture & Design Studios

Each and every project phase typically requires client sign-off before the next one can be billed, and a client sitting on a design review for a few extra weeks delays that phase's payment without changing anything about the work itself. Layer reimbursable consultant costs on top, paid by the studio on its own schedule and billed back to the client often a month or more later, and a firm running multiple phased projects can have several different timing gaps open at once, each easy to lose track of individually.

A larger architecture firm with several offices and an internal IT function could use Modern Treasury's API to tie reimbursable consultant payments to specific project phases automatically, flagging when reimbursement collection lags the studio's own payment to the consultant. That's a real capability, but building it requires engineering time most design studios, even successful ones, don't keep on staff.

For a twenty-person studio without a dedicated platform engineer, Trovata's finance-configurable dashboard, showing account balances and cash flow without requiring custom development, is the more realistic starting point. It won't automatically tie a specific reimbursable expense to a specific project the way custom logic could, but it removes the daily task of checking multiple bank logins to know where cash actually stands.

Say the studio pays a structural consultant's invoice in week one but doesn't bill the client for that reimbursable cost until the phase closes out in week six. Across four concurrent projects each with a similar gap, that's real cash tied up simultaneously, invisible until someone adds it all up by hand. A treasury platform doesn't remove the gap, since that's a function of how phase billing and reimbursables actually work, but it makes the total exposure visible enough to plan around instead of discovering it during a slow month.

Many studios batch reimbursable expenses into the next phase invoice rather than billing them as incurred, which widens the timing gap described above unnecessarily. This is a billing practice decision, not a treasury platform feature, but it's worth revisiting alongside your platform choice, since a shorter reimbursement cycle reduces the cash exposure a treasury tool would otherwise just be reporting on.

Confirm how each platform handles the volume and variety of consultant payments a multi-project studio generates, since reimbursable costs often come through as many small transactions rather than a few large ones. Ask whether reporting can reasonably be grouped by project even if that grouping requires manual tagging. And involve whoever currently handles reimbursable billing in the evaluation, since they'll notice integration gaps a principal reviewing a sales demo is unlikely to catch.

Before rolling out either platform, check these points:

• How it handles the volume and variety of consultant payments a multi-project studio generates, since reimbursable costs often arrive as many small transactions.
• Whether reporting can be grouped by project, even if that grouping requires manual tagging.
• Whether reimbursable expenses can be billed as incurred rather than at phase close, which shortens the gap between paying a consultant and collecting.
• Whether each project's phase clock is tracked separately, so overlapping reimbursable exposure is visible at a glance.

Picture the studio's four active projects sitting at different phases at the same moment: one still in schematic design, one deep into construction documents with heavy consultant involvement, one waiting on a client's design development sign-off, and one just closing out. Each has its own reimbursable exposure and its own billing timeline, and none of them line up. Viewed individually, each project looks manageable; viewed together without a consolidated cash view, the studio's principal is left estimating total exposure from memory, which is exactly the kind of estimate that tends to be wrong in the direction of underestimating risk.

Many studios see project starts cluster around certain times of year, tied to client fiscal calendars or construction season timing, which means reimbursable exposure isn't flat across the year either. A studio might carry relatively low reimbursable risk for months, then take on three new project starts within a few weeks and see that exposure climb quickly. Anticipating this pattern based on your own studio's typical project calendar, rather than reacting to it only once cash feels genuinely tight, is one of the more practical everyday uses of a consistent, up-to-date, always-current cash view across every account the studio holds.