There is a way of working shared by trades that look nothing alike: lawyers, architects, accountants, real estate brokers, consultants, customs agencies, expert witnesses.
They all handle cases. Each case belongs to a client, moves through stages, gathers documents, has deadlines and ends in a fee. They call it a file, a matter, a project, a build or a procedure, but it is the same shape.
And they all lose money in the same place.
The three holes
The file nobody moved
It is not the one that went wrong: it is the one that stood still. Nobody abandoned it on purpose; it simply stopped being at the top of the pile and six weeks went by.
Without a view of which stage each case is in, this does not get spotted. You find out when the client calls.
The document sitting in somebody's inbox
Everyone has lived this. The document exists, somebody has it, but it is in an attachment from three months ago and that person is on holiday today.
If documents do not live in the file, they do not belong to the firm: they belong to whoever received them.
The fee collected late
This is the costliest and the quietest. The work was done, the client is happy, and the invoice goes out three months later because nobody was tracking what was pending collection.
What actually works
Four things, and none of them are sophisticated:
- Stages with progress. Each case type has its stages and each stage a percentage. With that, one screen tells you what moved and what did not. That is ninety percent of the value.
- Documents inside the case. Not in email, not on somebody's desktop, not in an unsorted shared folder. Inside the file, in its folder.
- Deadlines with reminders. In these trades a missed deadline is not an inconvenience: it is a serious problem, sometimes with liability attached.
- Billing attached to the case. Fees and expenses live in the file, not in a separate spreadsheet. If they are together, "who owes me" is a query and not an afternoon.
The client portal
This is the part that surprises people most when it is switched on.
A good share of client communication is answering "how is mine going?". When the client can log in and see their progress, their documents and their balance, those queries drop on their own — and the ones that do arrive are the ones that genuinely need your judgement.
A warning: a portal where one client can see another's file is worse than no portal. Ask how isolation is guaranteed, and if the answer is "nobody makes mistakes", look for another answer. With Law 21.719 in force from December 1, 2026, this also stopped being merely good practice.
And not losing time between systems
The last link is billing. If you record the fee in one system and then open another to issue the invoice, you are typing the same thing twice at exactly the step where a mistake shows.
What we built
GesDoc is our answer. Case files with stages each office configures, documents by folder with preview and a trash bin, a calendar with deadlines and email reminders, fees with partial payments and expenses per file, and reports exportable to Excel.
The electronic invoice goes to the tax authority from the income entry itself, through the integration with MisHonorarios, with withholding already calculated.
And the client portal shows only their own: isolation between clients is covered by automated tests running on every change, not left to trust.
It is a 14-day trial with everything enabled and no card.
If your work is organized by case, build or procedure, we will set it up with your own file types.