StackMatch

Signs Your Engineering Firm Has SaaS Sprawl (And What It's Costing You)

In engineering firms specifically, sprawl usually starts with a merger or a new principal joining from another practice who already knows a different project-accounting platform — and eighteen months later, both are still billing. Here's how to tell if that's you, and what it costs.

By The StackMatch Research Team

Unchecked sprawl costs engineering firms $7,500-9,500/mo — consolidation saves $2,696-4,646/mo

$7,500-9,500Unconsolidated stack /mo
$4,804-4,854Optimized stack /mo
$2,696-4,646Monthly savings

For a 15-person civil/structural engineering consultancy.

The clearest tell in an engineering firm isn't a dramatic overspend — it's a merger or a new-principal hire that never fully closed out. A structural principal joins already trained on Deltek Ajera; the firm has run BQE CORE for a decade. Eighteen months later, both platforms are still active because migrating years of project history and subconsultant billing setups felt riskier than just paying for both. That's the single most common and most expensive sprawl pattern we see in this vertical, and it's rarely the only one running quietly in the background.

A structured audit — not a gut-check — is what actually surfaces sprawl in an engineering firm's stack.

Ask these before you assume your stack is fine

  • Are you paying for both Deltek Ajera and BQE CORE right now — even if one is 'just for a transition period' after a merger or new hire?
  • Does your bookkeeper manually re-key project-accounting exports into QuickBooks instead of relying on a live sync?
  • Could you state your combined monthly software spend right now, within 20%, without pulling up a spreadsheet?
  • Is a legacy payroll processor still active as a 'backup' after the firm moved to Gusto?
  • Do you know how many Autodesk AEC Collection named-user seats are actually assigned to current staff, versus people who've left?
  • Has anyone said 'we should really audit our subscriptions' this year without it actually happening?

What each signal actually costs

Sprawl signal, cost, and pillar

SignalMonthly costPillar
Running both Deltek Ajera and BQE CORE$1,450 combined vs. $700-750 for one platformCore Operations
Idle Autodesk named-user seats after headcount changesTypically $100-300 in unused seatsCore Operations
Legacy payroll contract kept as a Gusto backup+$150-300Finance
GovWin IQ paid for but nobody logs into it$400 with no BD activity to show for itSales & Marketing
Manual subconsultant invoice routing instead of Bill.comStaff time, not a bill — but realFinance

The single biggest fixable number: project-accounting overlap

$700-750/mo
What running two project-accounting platforms costs beyond the single-platform option
$1,450 combined vs. $700-750 for whichever one the firm actually needs — pure overlap, zero added capability.
Tool ATool Bsame job, paid twice

Two project-accounting platforms doing the same job is the single most expensive sprawl signal in this vertical.

The riskiest sprawl signal isn't the priciest one — it's Huntress Managed EDR paid for but not actively monitored after the IT contact who set it up leaves. Several municipal and DOT procurement processes now expect firms to attest to active endpoint monitoring, and a lapsed-but-still-billing EDR subscription is worse than not having one, because it creates a false-attestation risk.

A 30-day sprawl audit for an engineering firm

An illustration of a bar chart showing cost savings.

Consolidation savings show up fast once the redundant project-accounting platform is actually closed out.

A 30-day sprawl audit for an engineering firm

  • Week 1: Pull every recurring software charge from the last three months off the firm's card and bank statement — not what the office manager remembers.
  • Week 1: Flag anything billing twice for the same job — both project-accounting platforms, two password managers, a payroll backup.
  • Week 2: Get the actual current named-user seat count for Autodesk AEC Collection and compare it to current headcount.
  • Week 2: Confirm whether GovWin IQ activity logs show anyone actually using it this quarter.
  • Week 3: Cancel or fully migrate off the redundant project-accounting platform, with a firm data-migration completion date, not an open-ended one.
  • Week 4: Re-run the total and confirm it lands near $4,804-4,854/mo for a firm your size.

Consolidation in engineering almost always means picking one project-accounting platform and fully migrating off the other — not adding a sixth tool to bridge the gap. The savings come from finishing a transition you already started, not from cutting capability.

Run the free audit with your real headcount and current spend to see exactly where your stack stands.

Run your own audit
More on civil/structural engineering consultancy