The audit pipeline a 10–100 person boutique law firm actually needs.

Bar dues, filing fees, expert witness retainers, client-reimbursable costs — anything that ever debits or credits a client trust account must never co-mingle with an operating invoice line. PODetect reads the invoice-side marker on every line (trust vs. operating), routes trust-side postings through a separate code-path with its own confidence thresholds, and refuses to post a trust-side line against an operating cost centre or vice-versa. The morning digest lists the rule that fired, the canonical trust ledger it landed on, and the suggested next action — so trust and operating both close clean every month, without a manual reconciliation across two ledgers.

A document vendor, an e-discovery platform, or a court reporter charges one invoice against a single firm-wide cost centre when the spend actually covers several open matters — a doc review that served three litigations, a court reporter who covered four depositions across two cases. PODetect detects the cross-matter split on the line, cross-checks the vendor's own matter-tag metadata if present, and either proposes a split-allocation by matter code or pauses the posting for the responsible partner to confirm. The morning digest lists the line, the matters it touched, the proposed split, and the rule that fired — so the bill lands on the right matter, not the firm's general overhead.

An engagement letter that caps expert-witness fees at USD 9,500 while the vendor's invoice lands at USD 14,200. A letter that names a flat-fee scope while the invoice itemises hours that were never included. A retainer that allows a USD 2,000 filing-fee envelope and the actual filing came in at USD 2,750. PODetect cross-checks every invoice against its matched engagement letter — fees vs cap, flat-fee scope vs itemised hours, expense envelope vs actual — and pauses any line that drifts. The morning digest lists the engagement, the rule that fired, the canonical letter value, and the suggested next action so a single reviewer can resolve it before the month's trust reconciliation runs.

A new of-counsel hire, a lateral partner addition, or a shared-services consultant each opens a vendor record outside the master workflow — remit-to changes that look like a shell, near-duplicate vendor names for the same firm, banking changes that fire the day a new lateral starts billing. PODetect watches the vendor master against a canonical counterparty dictionary, holds any new vendor record that doesn't match the dictionary for human review, and surfaces near-duplicates and banking-change events on the morning digest. The rule fires the day a lateral starts billing, not sixty days later when the audit trail is already cold.