Every firm we know keeps its money in a different place from its matters. The cases live in one system; the client account, the invoice records and the invoicing live in an accounting package that, realistically, only the finance partner ever opens. So reconciliation becomes a quarterly Excel exercise, fee-earner ROI becomes an anecdote at renewal time, and invoicing means re-keying matter data into a second system by hand.

We built the finance suite to close that gap: the firm's money, handled in the same surface as the firm's work.

Client account: three figures compared, no compliance finding

The client-account screen compares three figures the firm types in: the bank or building society statement balance, the cash book balance and the client ledger total. It works out the difference between each pair, rounds the largest to two decimal places and classifies it: balanced when nothing remains after rounding to the penny, otherwise a difference to investigate, banded by size up to critical. Even a difference under £1 is labelled one to investigate. Those bands are this product's own arithmetic, not a regulator's thresholds. A blank or unreadable figure means the comparison has not run, never that it balanced.

For a firm in England and Wales the screen states the five-week interval in SRA Accounts Rules Rule 8.3, calculated only from the reconciliations saved on this screen. If none has been saved here within five weeks, it says so and asks you to check the firm's complete records. It does not call that a breach, because a reconciliation done anywhere else is invisible to it.

Each saved comparison records the name typed in and the role selected, COFA or manager of the firm, and can be downloaded as a PDF of those sign-off details. The PDF is unsigned: the typed name is not the Rule 8.3 sign-off until the COFA or manager signs the record.

Nothing here connects to your bank or your accounting system. It does not reconcile the account for you, find that the firm complies with the Accounts Rules or prevent a breach. It does the arithmetic and keeps the record. Investigating and resolving a difference, and signing off the reconciliation, remain with the COFA or manager. That is the correct division of labour for money that is not the firm's own.

The rest of the money, in one place

Around the client account sit the numbers a partner actually chases:

  • Invoice age groups the chaseable invoices that were read successfully by age from issue date, current, thirty-one to sixty days, sixty-one to ninety, and beyond ninety, with each currency totalled on its own. Each invoice counts at its full recorded total even when it is part-paid: payments are not deducted, so a total is not the balance still owed and an age is not a finding that an invoice is overdue. It is a list for the partner to review, not a decision about whom to chase. When a provider fails, a matter stays unread or a list is cut off at its page limit, the card says so, and the affected totals are a floor rather than the whole.
  • Time is tracked against the matter it belongs to, where the work is happening, not reconstructed from memory at month-end.
  • Settlement history shows what share of the records in the firm's precedent bank, the pseudonymised outcomes of closed matters of the same type and jurisdiction, carry the recorded outcome settlement. Only records with a recorded final outcome count, and a percentage appears only once there are at least three of them; below three, no percentage appears. It does not count case law, and it is a historical base rate, not a prediction for the matter in front of you.

Measured activity and modelled time

The per-fee-earner view keeps two kinds of figure apart. Measured figures are counted from the firm's own records: time actually recorded on the ledger, drafts produced and AI invocations. Beside them sits a separate modelled block built on fixed assumptions, with its arithmetic printed. Those assumptions have never been validated against a real timesheet, so the modelled time and utilisation are not savings and must not be quoted as savings, at renewal or anywhere else. The same applies on a matter's Billing tab, where the AI activity panel is headed as a modelled manual-time difference: fixed manual-time estimates per action type minus measured AI run time, an assumption and not measured savings.

Invoicing, without the re-keying

For UK matters, invoicing creates the invoice PDF and a structured JSON sidecar for the firm's accountant to review or transform for its accounting workflow. Both are built in the browser, with no remote invoicing API, so the matter data you already captured does not get typed a second time. No direct import into, connection to, or submission through any accounting or MTD service is implemented or proved. Give the PDF and JSON to your accountant and follow the digital-record process they confirm.

Most legal AI tools punt finance to an integration or ignore it, because finance is unglamorous and jurisdiction-specific and easy to get wrong. We built the parts we can state exactly: arithmetic on figures the firm supplies, records kept beside the matter, and every limit printed next to the result. The judgement about the firm's money stays with the people responsible for it.

← All posts