Employee monitoring and DLP built for firms that hold other people's money and secrets
A CA or audit firm's real exposure isn't a slow employee - it's client financial data, PAN and Aadhaar-adjacent records, and audit workpapers walking out on a USB drive or a personal Gmail. Generic employee-monitoring software wasn't built for that risk profile. Custelis was.
Most employee monitoring tools sell productivity - idle time, app usage, screenshots for a leaderboard. That's a real need, but it's the wrong starting point for a firm whose actual liability is a client engagement letter, not a timesheet. If you run a CA practice, audit firm, or consulting shop in India, here's what you actually need a monitoring tool to do.
What a CA or audit firm's risk profile actually looks like
- Client data spans multiple engagements at once. One associate might have access to five clients' financials in a week. Generic DLP tools log "a file was moved" - they don't know which client it belonged to or whether that associate was even staffed on that engagement.
- The exposure is bidirectional. A departing employee taking a client list is one risk. A junior accidentally emailing the wrong client's ITR to the wrong recipient is a different, more common one - and it needs a warn-before-send control, not just a post-incident log.
- Your own compliance obligations are layered on top of your clients'. ICAI's code of conduct, engagement confidentiality terms, and now the DPDP Act's employer obligations toward your own staff, all apply simultaneously.
What Custelis does specifically for this
Client-data registry
A real registry of which employee is assigned to which client, with full access-history logging and an approval workflow before any bulk export - not a generic "file activity" log you have to reverse-engineer into client context yourself.
DLP with warn-or-block, not just log
USB, file-transfer, email, and cloud-storage rules that can warn or block in the moment - the wrong-recipient email gets caught before it sends, not discovered in an audit trail three weeks later.
Fair productivity reporting, not a leaderboard
Role-aware, active-vs-idle-aware reporting designed against being read as a ranking - useful for capacity planning across engagements without turning performance management into surveillance theater.
DPDP-ready for your own staff
Your firm is the employer here too. Self-service data-principal rights, the 72-hour breach clock, and a Section-7-legitimate-use configuration are built in - see the full framework.
Screenshots, only if you decide you need them
Off by default. If your compliance posture calls for them on a specific engagement, they're active-only, capped at 60/hour, with exclusion zones and a full access log on every view.
Explainable risk, human decides
Behavioral baselines flag unusual activity as a signal for a partner or IT lead to look at - never an automated accusation, never an automated action.
What this isn't: a keylogger, a way to read your team's personal WhatsApp, or something installed without them knowing. Every device shows a tray icon and a monitoring notice; every employee has a self-service portal showing exactly what's collected about them. See the full list of what's never implemented, by design.
If your engagements specifically involve Aadhaar, PAN, or GSTIN records - true for most CA and audit work - see how those get classified and enforced on the Aadhaar, PAN & GST data protection page. And for what a real client-data audit trail should actually track, see this breakdown.
Pricing that scales with headcount, not engagement volume
Priced per employee per month - DLP, client-data access logging, and the DPDP data-principal-rights workflow are included from the Starter plan, not gated behind an enterprise tier your firm has to negotiate up to. See current plans.
See the client-data registry and DLP rules live
No credit card to start. Intrusive features stay off until your own DPIA is recorded.
Try for free