Mercury vs Relay: Banking for IT Consultancies and MSPs

Before comparing features, run through a few questions that catch the mistakes MSPs make most often. Are recurring MSP contract payments landing in the same account as one-off project invoices, with no way to tell at a glance how much of this month's balance is recurring versus one-time? Is vendor cost, software licenses resold to clients, hardware purchased on their behalf, sitting in the same bucket as your own payroll, making margin on resold items hard to see? Are you tracking which clients are on auto-pay versus which ones you're manually chasing every month? Both Mercury and Relay can fix all three, but only if you deliberately set up separate accounts or sub-accounts for recurring contract revenue, project revenue, and pass-through vendor costs rather than accepting whatever default structure the bank opens you with.

Relay's free, instantly created checking sub-accounts are a close structural match for the recurring versus project split above. Route recurring MSP contract payments into one account, project invoices into a second, and vendor pass-through costs, licenses and hardware bought for a client and rebilled, into a third, and your monthly close becomes a matter of checking three balances instead of untangling one. Assign a dedicated virtual card to the vendor pass-through account specifically, so hardware and license purchases for clients never accidentally draw from payroll funds during a busy procurement month.

Firms already running a professional services automation platform to track tickets, contracts and billing get more out of Mercury's programmatic access: pulling bank transactions into the PSA tool to auto-match payments against open invoices removes a manual reconciliation step that otherwise eats a bookkeeper's time every week. That same API supports programmatic ACH for vendor payments, useful for a firm rebilling software licenses or hardware to clients at volume. If your firm runs entirely off spreadsheets and a shared inbox instead of a PSA platform, that API advantage is mostly theoretical until you have someone who'll actually build against it.

A firm with a healthy, well-priced recurring contract base often carries a larger cash cushion than a project-only shop, simply because recurring revenue is more predictable and less needs to sit ready for an unplanned expense. The effective federal funds rate is at 3.63%¹ today, and Mercury's automated Treasury sweep is built specifically to capture yield near that level on cash sitting above your working buffer, without anyone needing to remember to move it manually. If your recurring base has grown to the point that a meaningful cushion sits idle between the monthly billing cycle and payroll, that's worth automating rather than leaving in a checking account paying close to nothing.

Projects that require buying hardware up front and getting reimbursed by the client on delivery sometimes need a short-term credit line to bridge the gap, especially for a firm without much cash cushion. That credit is priced off the bank prime rate, at 6.75%² right now, so factor the real cost of carrying that balance for a few weeks into your project margin before you quote it, not after. A firm that's routinely financing hardware purchases at prime plus a spread and not pricing that cost into the project quote is giving away margin it never has to.

Once your account structure is right, onboarding a new recurring client should be a matter of adding a line to an existing sub-account's expected inflows, not a fresh banking decision each time. Document the setup, which account recurring payments land in, which one handles vendor pass-through, how often you reconcile each one, so a new hire or a part-time bookkeeper can follow it without asking. Firms that skip this step tend to relearn the same lessons about mixed accounts every time they bring on staff, instead of onboarding against a process that already works.

That documentation matters even more the first time a founder steps back from day-to-day bookkeeping. A firm that's grown to the point of hiring an office manager or a fractional controller needs that person to be able to look at three account balances and know, without a conversation, whether the recurring base is healthy this month. Write down the expected range for each sub-account, what recurring revenue should look like given your current contract roster, roughly what vendor pass-through should net after markup, so a deviation is obvious to whoever's watching the accounts, not just to the person who built the spreadsheet originally.

Onboard each new recurring client with these steps:

1. Add the client's expected payment to the recurring contract account's list of inflows instead of making a fresh banking decision.
2. Route any resold licenses or hardware bought for the client through the vendor pass-through account so margin stays visible.
3. Set how often each account gets reconciled, so the new client fits an existing monthly close routine.
4. Write the setup down so a new hire or a part-time bookkeeper can follow it without asking you.