Mercury vs Relay: Banking for a Life Sciences Consultancy

A project funded by a government or foundation grant typically reimburses allowable costs after they're incurred and documented, sometimes with a lag of many weeks between spending the money and being reimbursed for it. That gap has to be funded from somewhere in the meantime, and a dedicated bridge account, sized against your typical reimbursement lag and funded from the firm's own reserve, keeps that funding need visible and managed rather than discovered when payroll comes due before a reimbursement has cleared. Relay's free sub-accounts make setting up that bridge account a same-day task; Mercury's account structure supports the same approach and adds an API for a firm tracking grant budgets in dedicated research administration software.

Set up a grant funding bridge in these steps:

1. Measure your typical lag between spending grant money and being reimbursed for allowable costs.
2. Open a dedicated bridge account sized against that reimbursement lag.
3. Fund the account from the firm's own reserve, so the funding need stays visible and managed.
4. Keep grant funds separate from private client funds, so allowable costs stay traceable to the specific grant.

Engagements tied to a client's own trial or regulatory milestones can pay in large, irregular chunks whenever the client actually hits that milestone, which is often later than originally planned in a field where regulatory timelines routinely slip. Treat a milestone payment the way a firm with lumpy project revenue anywhere else would: route it into a dedicated account rather than general operating cash, and release it to the firm's working capital on a planned schedule rather than the day it clears, so one large payment doesn't distort near-term planning.

A consultancy running several grant-funded projects alongside milestone-funded client work at the same time needs to track each funding source's allowable costs and remaining balance separately, both for its own planning and because grant funders typically require it. A dedicated sub-account per major funding source, whether a specific grant or a specific client engagement, makes that separation concrete rather than something reconstructed from a general ledger at reporting time. This is one area where Mercury's API genuinely pays off for a firm with any research administration software already tracking grant budgets, since balances can sync automatically instead of being re-entered by hand each month.

A firm carrying a working capital reserve to bridge reimbursement lags is holding cash that should be earning something while it waits. The 10-year Treasury yield sits at 4.44%¹, a reasonable reference point for what conservative, liquid reserve cash should be earning rather than sitting flat in checking. Mercury's automated Treasury sweep captures yield near current short-duration rates on cash above your working buffer without a manual transfer, which fits a reserve that needs to stay liquid but isn't touched for weeks or months at a stretch.

A firm bridging a longer-than-expected gap between milestone payments with a line of credit is borrowing at a cost tied to the bank prime rate, currently 6.75%². Given how routinely regulatory and trial timelines slip in this field, build a realistic delay buffer into your own cash planning rather than assuming milestones will land on the client's original schedule, since financing around a delay you should have anticipated is more expensive than planning for it from the start.

A firm managing several active grants with formal reporting requirements to funders gets real value from Mercury's API feeding into dedicated research administration or grants management software. A firm doing mostly milestone-funded private client work without formal grant reporting obligations is usually well served by Relay's simpler, free sub-account structure and its native QuickBooks or Xero integration, at least until grant-funded work becomes a large enough share of the business to justify more specialized tooling.

Life sciences consultancies often bring in subcontracted specialists, a biostatistician, a regulatory affairs expert, a specific therapeutic area consultant, for a single engagement rather than keeping that expertise on staff full time. Reserve for that subcontractor cost the moment an engagement is scoped to include it, in the same dedicated account funding the engagement itself, rather than waiting for their invoice to arrive before deciding how it will be paid. A specialist who's expecting prompt payment for a defined piece of work doesn't care whether your own milestone payment has landed yet, and treating their cost with the same discipline as payroll protects a relationship you'll likely want to draw on again for a future engagement.

Unlike a typical consulting engagement where the deliverable is mostly a matter of staff time, scientific and technical consulting sometimes runs into genuine uncertainty in the underlying work itself, an experiment that needs to be repeated, an analysis that surfaces an unexpected result requiring more investigation. Build a modest contingency into project-level cash planning for this kind of slack, distinct from the funding-source bridge covered above, so a firm isn't caught short covering staff time on a project that legitimately needed more effort than originally scoped, through no client's fault and no funder's fault either.