Rate-card mismatch.
Negotiated bill rates per role-and-seniority vary across engagements.
How LEGERIS catches itLEGERIS validates every line-item rate against the contracted rate card.
Rate cards and hours
Professional services.
Rate-card discipline is the audit posture firms apply to their clients. The same discipline applies in reverse, on the invoices they receive from subcontractors and external counsel.
Section 1
Sector context.
Professional-services invoices look simple — a list of timekeepers, their hours, their rates, a total. The complexity hides in the contract. Engagement letters carry rate cards by role and seniority. SOWs carry hour budgets and deliverable lists. Amendments shift both. By the time the invoice arrives, the contractual basis is dispersed across three documents the accounts-payable team has never seen.
The cost-leak in professional services lives in the gap between the contract and the invoice. A senior partner’s rate on a junior associate’s hours. Travel time billed inside business hours. Scope-adjacent work billed as scope. Each gap is small. Multiplied across an engagement, the gaps move real money.
Section 2
Common patterns we catch.
Hours-billed variance.
When the invoiced hours exceed the SOW-budgeted hours, the variance needs to map to documented scope amendments.
How LEGERIS catches itLEGERIS flags hours that exceed budget without a corresponding amendment.
Scope-creep billing.
Fixed-fee engagements sometimes carry hourly overages billed as “outside scope.”
How LEGERIS catches itLEGERIS cross-references the SOW deliverable list against the line-item descriptions.
Expense reimbursement compliance.
Travel, accommodation, meal, and incidental expenses have category-specific policy thresholds.
How LEGERIS catches itLEGERIS validates every reimbursable line against the policy.
Junior-rate-billed-as-senior.
When a junior associate's time is invoiced at a senior partner's rate.
How LEGERIS catches itLEGERIS cross-references the timekeeper roster against the contracted rate by seniority.
Section 3
How LEGERIS catches them.
The engagement letter, SOW, and any amendments are ingested into the rulebook. Each invoice is extracted into a structured schema — timekeeper, role, hours, rate, line description. The deterministic engine cross-validates every line: rate against rate-card-by-role, hours against budget plus amendments, line description against SOW deliverables, expense reimbursements against policy thresholds. Every finding carries the contracted-rate-vs-invoiced-rate delta, the source line, and the calculation. The dispute letter writes itself from the structured findings.
Ready to engage.
Audit a batch of professional-services invoices. We will scope the engagement and quote the fee.