How does Vergo work alongside Smokeball?
Smokeball is a legal practice management platform, and your books live in an accounting system next to it — QuickBooks, Sage, or another general ledger. Vergo handles expense management against that accounting system: it reads your GL accounts and coding structure, codes every transaction by AI inference from your own history, and posts clean entries where your books actually live.
Why doesn't Vergo connect to Smokeball directly?
Smokeball is a hosted cloud product with a REST API, and its documentation and OpenAPI spec are public — but API credentials are granted through a partner program application rather than self-serve signup. A firm cannot simply generate a key; access is provisioned per partner after Smokeball approves the application. More to the point, Smokeball is not where your general ledger lives. Matters, contacts, documents and time entries live in Smokeball; your chart of accounts lives in the accounting system beside it. Expense management belongs against the ledger, so that is where Vergo connects.
What does that mean for a law firm day to day?
- Attorneys and staff submit receipts by text message — no new app alongside Smokeball
- Every transaction is coded to your accounting structure automatically, with the reasoning shown — a filing fee, an expert-witness invoice and a client dinner each land on the right account without a bookkeeper re-keying them
- Costs that need to be billed back to a matter stay identifiable, because the coding preserves the detail your billing workflow needs
- Approvals run on your rules before anything posts
- Your accounting system stays the system of record, reconciled next to Smokeball
Do you have to change cards?
No. Vergo is card-agnostic — it connects to the corporate, fuel and personal cards your business already holds. Partners keep the cards with the rewards and credit lines they already negotiated; Vergo captures the transactions from those cards and does the coding work.
What about the receipts themselves?
Vergo reads each receipt line by line rather than just the header, so the GL prediction reflects what was actually purchased — court costs versus office supplies versus client entertainment — not just the vendor name. Each coding shows its reasoning, so whoever closes the books confirms in seconds instead of re-coding by hand.
How do you get started?
Connect the accounting system your firm already reconciles against, connect the cards, and Vergo learns your coding from your own history. Smokeball keeps running your matters exactly as it does today; nothing about your practice management setup changes.
Where should you go next?
Does Vergo integrate directly with Smokeball?
No — and it does not need to. Smokeball is an operations platform, not a general ledger. Vergo connects to the accounting system your books live in, which is where expense management belongs.
Which accounting systems does Vergo connect to?
Vergo integrates with every major ERP and accounting system, each with its own integration page setting out how the sync works.
Do we have to change cards?
No. Vergo works with the cards your business already has.
