Procurement Training & Invoice Controls | Custodia Advisory

The Last Line of Defence Is Only as Strong as the People Holding It

An Outside Counsel Guideline is only enforced at one point in the billing lifecycle: the moment a procurement or finance team member receives an invoice and decides whether it is compliant before approving it for payment.

Everything else — the drafting, the negotiation, the signing — is preparation. Enforcement happens here, at this moment, with this person, looking at this invoice. And in most institutions, the people at that point have never been specifically trained on what enforcement actually requires.

The result is not negligence. It is a gap — between the standard the guideline sets and the knowledge the people applying it have been given. Closing that gap is what procurement training does.

The Offshore and Cross-Jurisdictional Challenge

For private equity and asset management institutions operating across multiple jurisdictions, the procurement challenge is structural as well as technical.

Procurement and finance teams are frequently distributed — based in Cayman, BVI, Luxembourg, Dublin, Singapore, or other offshore centres where the fund structures and entities they support are domiciled. These teams are often small, highly capable in fund administration and corporate governance, and operating with limited direct oversight from a central legal or compliance function.

What they are rarely given is specific, practical training on legal billing compliance. The Outside Counsel Guidelines governing the firms they are processing invoices for may have been drafted by a head office legal team in New York or London. The billing standards those guidelines set may reflect onshore market norms that don't translate intuitively to the offshore context. And the escalation path for a non-compliant invoice — who to call, what to say, how to push back on a Magic Circle or Wall Street firm — is rarely documented at all.

This is where billing irregularities accumulate most consistently: not because offshore procurement teams are less diligent, but because they have been given less of the specific knowledge and process support they need to do this particular job well.

Custodia Advisory works with distributed and offshore procurement teams specifically — training them in the context of the jurisdictions they operate in, the fund structures they support, and the panel relationships they are managing.

What Procurement Training Covers

Training is built around your institution's specific OCG, billing history, and panel relationships — not a generic programme. Across engagements, it consistently covers:

Reading an invoice against the OCG The practical skill of checking an invoice against a guideline — what to look for, in what order, and how to assess whether an entry is compliant or not. This is more specific than it sounds: most procurement teams read invoices as approvers, not as auditors. The mindset and the method are different.

Recognising the patterns that matter The billing irregularities that appear most frequently in your billing history — block billing, unauthorised rate increases, staffing non-compliance, vague disbursements, out-of-scope work — explained with real examples and a practical checklist tailored to your OCG.

Querying and rejecting professionally How to raise a non-compliance issue with an external law firm — what to say, how to say it, and how to hold the line without creating unnecessary friction in a relationship that matters to the institution. This is one of the most consistently underserved skills in procurement training: people know something is wrong but don't feel equipped or empowered to push back on a senior partner at a major firm.

Escalation protocols A clear, documented process for what happens when a non-compliant invoice is identified — who is notified, what the timeline is, what the firm is told, and how the resolution is recorded. Without this, individual team members are making judgement calls in isolation, and patterns of non-compliance go unrecorded even when individual instances are caught.

Cross-jurisdictional considerations For offshore and distributed teams, specific guidance on how billing standards apply in the jurisdictions they are working in — including where local market norms differ from the OCG standard, and how to handle billing from firms operating under different regulatory frameworks.

Record keeping and audit readiness How to maintain a record of invoice review decisions — what was checked, what was queried, what was resolved, and what remains outstanding. This record is both a management tool and, for institutions with LP or investor reporting obligations, a component of demonstrating that cost governance is real and operational.

Training Formats

We design training to fit your team's size, location, and operating model:

Workshop sessions In-person or virtual sessions with your procurement and finance teams — structured around your OCG, your billing history, and the specific firms and jurisdictions your team is managing. Typically half a day for an initial programme, with follow-up sessions as the team's knowledge develops.

One-to-one coaching For smaller teams or individual team members taking on invoice review responsibility for the first time — focused, practical, and built around their specific role and the invoices they are actually processing.

Written protocols and reference materials A tailored invoice review checklist, an escalation protocol, and a quick-reference guide to your OCG's key requirements — designed to sit on a desk or in a shared folder and be used on every invoice, not filed after training and never consulted again.

Ongoing support Access to Custodia Advisory for queries as they arise — a specific invoice that isn't clearly addressed by the OCG, a firm that is pushing back on a rejection, a new matter type that raises a billing question the current guideline doesn't answer. Procurement teams working in real time need real-time support, not just a training session.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A private equity firm with fund structures across Cayman and Luxembourg has a procurement function split between both jurisdictions — two people in Cayman, one in Luxembourg, each processing invoices from a panel of eight firms across multiple jurisdictions. The OCG was drafted by the New York legal team three years ago. None of the procurement team has been trained on it. Invoices are reviewed against budget and coded to the correct entity, but no one is checking them against the guideline.

We run an initial workshop with all three team members — remotely, to accommodate both locations — using twelve months of the firm's own invoices as the working material. We identify the four breach patterns that appear most frequently in their specific billing history, build a one-page checklist tailored to their OCG, and design an escalation protocol that gives each team member a clear process for querying firms and recording the outcome.

In the following quarter, the team identifies and successfully queries non-compliant invoices from three of the eight panel firms. Two are resolved by credit note. One triggers a formal conversation between the firm's GC and the relevant partner — which leads to an OCG update that closes a gap that had existed since the original guideline was drafted.

How We Work

Every procurement training engagement begins with a review of your existing OCG, a sample of recent invoices, and a conversation with the team members who will be doing the checking. From there we design a programme that fits your team's size, location, and the specific billing relationships they are managing.

Training can be delivered as a standalone programme or as part of a broader OCG enforcement engagement — combined with an invoice audit, an OCG review, or an ongoing quarterly oversight arrangement.

Get in touch →