Most RIA firms don't have a fee audit problem.

Most RIA firms don’t have a fee audit problem. They have a data problem that’s being solved by hand.

Fee schedules typically live in free-text notes in the CRM: rate and account number typed into one box, no consistent format. A person can read it. Nothing else can. So someone on the ops team manually checks rates against schedules every quarter, because there’s no reliable way to automate a lookup against unstructured text.

That manual work is the actual cost, not the occasional fee error itself, but the hours spent every cycle catching errors before a client does.

Most vendors respond by building smarter extraction tools: better parsing, a pilot, see what sticks. That fixes the wrong layer. The data isn’t hard to read. It was never given a structured place to live.

The firms getting ahead of this aren’t buying smarter tools. They’re giving fee schedules a real, structured home instead of a paragraph of notes. Once that’s in place, the audit stops being someone’s job and starts happening automatically, catching problems before they get expensive.

That’s what Lea does: not a one-time fix, but something that runs quietly in the background and makes the operation more reliable.