Ring-fencing client and project funds for clear profitability

An IT services firm rarely handles only its own money. There are cloud reimbursements you are owed, prepaid project budgets clients have advanced, and licence pass-throughs you carry on a client's behalf. When all of that lands in one operating account, it commingles with your working cash, and the picture of which client is actually profitable goes blurry.

This guide is about operational separation at the level of the client and the project. It is not about segregating investor money or splitting by product line; it is about being able to answer, cleanly, what came in and went out for each engagement. Ring-fencing funds per client or project is how you get there.

What commingling costs you

When client budgets, reimbursements and pass-through spend all flow through the same balance, two problems follow. First, per-client profitability becomes a reconstruction exercise: you have to trace every charge and receipt back to an engagement after the fact, and the answer is only as good as your records. Second, handling client funds becomes opaque. If a client has prepaid a budget, you want to be able to show what remains of it without sifting through your whole operating history.

The deeper cost is decision-making. If you cannot see clearly which clients make money and which quietly lose it once infrastructure and licence costs are counted, you cannot price or scope future work well. Commingling does not just create admin; it hides the signal you most need.

What belongs in a ring-fence

Several kinds of money benefit from being held apart per client or project. Prepaid project budgets are funds a client has advanced for work and costs not yet incurred, and keeping them visible protects both sides. Cloud reimbursements are amounts you have spent and expect back, which are cleaner to track in their own pot. Licence pass-throughs sit in the same category: money moving through you rather than belonging to you.

Holding each of these against the specific client or project, rather than in one pooled balance, means the boundary is structural rather than notional. You are not relying on a spreadsheet to remember that part of your balance is really a client's prepaid budget; the separation is built into where the money sits.

Separating by client, project and entity

The practical pattern is a ring-fenced pot per client or per project, each holding that engagement's prepaid budget, reimbursements and pass-through spend. Cards scoped to a single engagement then draw from the right pot, so spend attributes itself and you are not sorting charges by hand. Real-time balances per pot tell you at any moment what each client's funds look like.

Larger firms often run multiple entities, with different clients or regions sitting under different legal entities. Being able to manage those entities in one place, while keeping each client's funds ring-fenced within them, gives you both the central view and the clean separation. The result is per-client and per-project profitability you can read directly rather than reconstruct.

• Hold a ring-fenced pot per client or project for budgets, reimbursements and pass-throughs.
• Scope cards to a single engagement so spend attributes itself.
• Keep clients under the right entity where you operate more than one.
• Read per-client balances in real time instead of reconstructing them later.

How Altery fits

Altery lets you ring-fence money into separate pots, one per client or project, so prepaid budgets, cloud reimbursements and licence pass-throughs each sit apart from your operating cash. Cards can be scoped per engagement, so the spend on a client's project draws from that client's pot and attributes itself without manual sorting.

Where you run more than one legal entity, multi-entity management lets you keep clients under the right entity while still seeing everything in one place. Real-time balances per pot mean per-client and per-project profitability is something you can read directly, rather than a figure you rebuild at month end from a commingled account.

Altery is not a bank. This is general information about organising client and project funds, not legal, accounting or financial advice; how you must hold client money depends on your jurisdiction and contracts, so take professional advice on your own obligations.

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