What the CFO asks — answered before the question lands.
External counsel spend, fee notes, retainer drawdown, budget gates and counsel scorecards. Rolled up by partner, vertical, BU and matter. GST-compliant invoicing across the Indian institute.
Why legal spend escapes finance discipline.
Spend you can't see is spend you can't control. Today most legal spend reconciles only at quarter-end, when the runaway matter is already a board-deck slide.
Fee notes arrive as PDFs nobody reconciles
External counsel emails an invoice. It goes to legal, then finance, then back to legal for matter mapping. Three weeks later it's paid — with no line-item check against the engagement letter or fee schedule.
Budgets exist on paper, not in the workflow
The matter has a ₹ 12 L budget in the engagement letter. Counsel raised ₹ 14 L in fees. Nobody flagged the breach because the budget never lived next to the invoice approval.
Counsel scorecards are anecdotal
Which partner wins more SARFAESI matters per ₹ spent? Who's consistently late on briefs? You can sense the answers but can't put numbers behind them — which means the panel never gets pruned.
Quarter-close is a guessing game
Open commitments not yet invoiced — that's a number finance needs at every close. Today it lives in counsel's head, surfaced via email round-robin three days before the books shut.
What the spend module gives the CFO and the GC.
Built for institutional buyers — banks, NBFCs, insurers and corporate legal teams that pay external counsel and need every rupee mapped, approved and reported.
Fee-note ingest with line-item parsing
Drop the PDF or fill the structured form — system extracts hours, rate, disbursements, taxes (CGST / SGST / IGST), TDS. Parsed against the engagement letter for instant variance flags.
Budget gates per matter
Engagement letter sets the budget. Each fee note checks against running totals. Approvals route by exception only — the 95% of clean invoices auto-route, the 5% that breach budget land on the legal head.
Exception-based approval workflow
Legal Head → Finance → CXO, but only when something asks for review. Within budget, within fee schedule, within SLA — auto-approve. Out of any of those — escalate with the variance highlighted.
Roll-up by partner / vertical / BU / client
₹ spent and recoverable, by counsel, by matter type, by business unit, by external client (for in-house teams that re-bill). Slice live, drill in two clicks, schedule the cut to land in the CFO's inbox every Monday.
Counsel scorecards
Spend per win, spend per hearing, on-time rate, average TAT on briefs. Numbers, not stories. Auto-flag underperformers; renew engagements based on data, not lobby visits.
GST-compliant invoicing & accruals
CGST / SGST / IGST handled. TDS computed and tracked. Open commitments not yet invoiced auto-roll into the accrual report finance needs at quarter-close. Tally / Zoho / SAP / Oracle export.
Why exception-based approval is the unlock.
“The legal head used to spend two days a month approving fee notes line by line. Now ninety-five percent auto-route, and the five percent that escalate come with the variance highlighted. We caught a runaway arbitration matter at month two — not at quarter-end.”