What CA firms told me when I walked in

At a CA office near my home, the man at the door said they were busy and to come back after 15 days. I asked if I could talk to anyone else for two or three questions about how they work. “No, they’re all busy, sir,” he said. So I called the CA from outside and told him I was outside his office. He asked what GST automation meant. I said clients send their data as PDFs and Excel files. “No, no, nobody sends it like that,” he said. So I asked how they did get it, and he said clients send Excel. I said that’s exactly what Nila takes in: the AI reads it and prepares the GST workings. He listened for a few seconds, said “okay, one minute,” and then had me come inside and talk to one of his staff.

She told me most of their clients send one to five bills, and they file many of them directly on the GST portal. A client takes around 30 minutes, and none take three or four hours. She kept asking what else Nila could do, and said the year-end reconciliation was where they had a lot of work. By the end, we both agreed they didn’t have much of a problem with GST filing.

That was September 29, near the end of a month of visiting and calling accounting offices around Chennai.

I was building Nila, an AI tool that turns a client’s bills into the GST workings a CA firm prepares every month. I’d talked to a few accountants since June, starting with my parents’ auditors, but not nearly enough. So in September I went out properly, and after each visit or call I dictated what happened into a small CRM. By the end of the month I had notes on 17 firms. This article is from those notes.

“This month is not possible”

On September 15 I walked into four offices in one area. At one, an older CA said it was good that I was doing this at such a young age, then said Tally and Zoho were already there and asked how I was different from them. I was panting from the walk and couldn’t explain it properly. When I said there was still some manual work left after those tools, he seemed to think it was very small, and asked me to come back in the first week of October. Another CA gave me about two minutes. He said everything was software for them, asked me to show him one firm I’d already worked with, said to send him a demo, and then said this month they were occupied. The other two asked me to come back on another day.

Many firms said some version of this. One CA on the phone said, “This month not possible.” Another kept moving it: October, then after October 10th, and then that they didn’t need it right now. A manager couldn’t meet because he had a GST notice to reply to that day.

September is tax audit season. I knew that, but I couldn’t tell how much of “this month is not possible” was real and how much was a polite no. Probably both.

On calls, asking “before you go, can I ask one last question?” kept people on the line long enough to tell me how much GST work they had. One CA said they did around 100 clients’ filings. The two firms that gave me real files both came through my parents. My mother’s auditor met me after my dad had called him three times, and then let me sit with his staff for an afternoon.

“It’s not like they are inefficient”

That’s what I wrote after visiting one of my parents’ auditors, a firm with about 120 GST clients, for the fifth time. A junior keys each client’s bills into an Excel working, copying from the PDF when the text can be selected and typing when it’s a scan. He checks every GSTIN on the GST portal and checks the invoice numbers against last month’s, and asks the client about any gaps. A senior checks every entry, and the manager checks the GSTINs, the number of documents in each table of the return, and the totals, then files it. They keep the Excel working because notices can come two years later, and they need a way to check what was actually filed and why.

The staff were fast. They moved through Excel with the keyboard and were good at it. At my mother’s auditor, a firm with about 300 GST clients and 20 staff who enter everything in Tally, the staff were quick too.

The time went elsewhere. Most clients send three to five bills, but the ones with 35 to 50 scanned bills have to be typed by hand. Clients send their bills late, mostly between the 7th and the 10th, even after the firm calls on the 7th to remind them. Near the deadline there are portal issues, and the staff stay until at least 8, sometimes 10 or 12. One person also spends half a day every 15 days logging into each client’s account to check for GST notices, and clients blame the firm when one is missed.

At the Tally firm, everything went into Tally first, whether it came as a PDF or Excel, with a ledger for every HSN code. Clients’ Excel files in their own formats couldn’t go through the GST offline tool, so after entering them in Tally, the staff typed the HSN summary into the portal by hand. The operator I sat with showed me the upload errors she’d hit. She’d tried it that day “just because I heard you were coming.”

For filing, the firms I met mostly used Winman, Computax or KDK, which have all been around for 20 years or more. There were no videos for them online, only long documentation. Next to them, Tally, which I’d thought of as hard to use, was the approachable one. There’s so much about it online that I could just ask ChatGPT.

“Right now we don’t need it”

Some offices were fine as they were.

At a small firm near my house, I talked to two people for about ten minutes. They had about 50 clients and six staff, each handling roughly ten clients, at maybe thirty minutes a client, with other work in between. Most of their clients already sent Excel registers: the firm tells clients what information it needs, and each client keeps it in their own format. They asked whether AI could do the classification itself. And they told me it’s not like they get hundreds of bills right before the deadline. “At this point in time, we don’t need it,” they said.

At another firm, mostly audit work, the CA told me their 50 or so GST clients were high-value businesses that sent four or five bills each, so sales was “pretty much covered” for them. Purchase reconciliation took a team of two about two days, and he thought software might bring it to a day or less. He suggested I go to tax consultants who handle a lot of GST filing for around ₹500 a client, because that’s where I’d find the volume. If I got the purchase side done, he said, I could come back and he’d talk to his partner.

The firm from the start of this article charged around ₹1,000 for a GST filing, and said they couldn’t charge more because clients already send everything in Excel.

“Show me one firm you’ve worked with”

The other thing I kept running into was credibility. The CA who gave me two minutes wanted to see one firm I’d already worked with. Another CA, whose firm used Computax, asked on the phone whether my software was “more powerful than that.” One owner who had already seen Nila on my laptop asked me to send him a demo. A few said they already had a tool or software for it, and I didn’t find out what that was.

The most useful conversation was with a CA whose firm already paid for Claude. He used it to get bank statements out, but it “gives debit credit and all wrong sometimes,” so it had to be checked. He kept saying that cross-verification takes the most time. He also said it didn’t handle GST-specific cases like SEZ and RCM without switching modes. He wouldn’t let me open my laptop for a demo, since it was tax audit season. When I said I wasn’t there to show my software, just to understand what work was still left in a tech-forward firm, he talked with me for about an hour. At the end I offered a free first year, then an 80% discount, if I could come in regularly and build it with them. He said, “It’s not really about the price, you know.” Working through it with me for a few weeks would take his own time, and he said that would cost him lakhs. He’d still have to confirm it himself, and his staff would have to understand it, and he’d have more time in November or December.

The best response came from the 120-client firm. They gave me bills and workings for three clients over two months, and the partner said that if Nila gave proper results, he’d introduce me to a friend whose clients are scrap dealers with around 300 bills. He also said I should charge money for this. Later, they said they’d try Nila in October next to their own process.

There was no easy arbitrage

Before I went out, my picture was that every business has to file GST, so firms must be spending a lot of time on it. Some were. My mother’s auditor had about 300 GST clients and 20 people entering bills into Tally, and it was more like a factory. But a lot of firms had only 50 or so GST clients, maybe 30 or 40 percent of all their clients. They split them across five or six juniors, each junior gets through their ten in a couple of days, and at around ₹1,000 a client, that’s about ₹50,000 a month of GST work. The real money is in audit, consulting and litigation.

The juniors are there anyway, because they also do income tax and everything else, so taking GST off their plate doesn’t mean the firm needs fewer people. They’re paid around ₹10,000 a month, often B.Com graduates who stay a year or two and leave. The manager is the one who stays for ten years and actually runs things. So it was a small, efficient team at a local optimum, and I was asking them to change how they work to cut people they’d keep anyway. It was actually harder to get small firms like these to switch than bigger ones that were already open to automation.

I’d also assumed mistakes would push firms to automate. But a mistake mostly costs the client. At the 120-client firm, the partner told me a client I’d just seen there had paid a penalty of about ₹1 lakh over a notice that was missed. Nila had notice tracking, and it still wasn’t urgent for him. A client isn’t going to leave a CA they’ve been with for ten years over one notice, and with so many documents going through, firms treat some human error as normal. It reminded me of the financial crisis, where the people who got it wrong weren’t the ones who paid for it.

Part of it was what I found out later is called the lemons problem. So many people come to these firms selling software that “automation software” goes straight into a category they’ve already said no to: we don’t need it, we already use a tool, if there’s a need we’ll call you. They didn’t know what Nila actually did, and they had no way to tell it apart from the rest.

Looking back, I think promising outcomes would have been easier for them than selling software: if you don’t have the capacity, we’ll do the work. A junior doesn’t only enter bills. They talk to clients, deal with the portals, and send emails and WhatsApp messages. To replace that, you have to do the whole job end to end, which is a lot harder than the GST tool I built.

What I took from it

After the small firm near my house, I wrote in my notes: “Do you think everybody is like this, or will there be people who do need automation?” I still think there are. The hard part was finding them. CA firms are easy to find on Google Maps, but from outside you can’t tell how much GST work a firm does. My method was to put the CA firms near me on Google Maps and go visit them. It was primitive, but it was also the only way I had. The firm with the most clients of anyone I met, the one with a room full of fast Tally operators, had no online presence at all, and I only got there through my parents.

Part of the reason is that CAs weren’t allowed to advertise until recently, and most still don’t. The audit-heavy CA told me that’s why his firm had moved into audit work instead of GST. So tax consultants advertise as the best in Chennai and take the bulk GST work, while CA firms keep the books and do the audits and income tax. The ways in seem to be through the Tally partners who install Tally for these firms, or by being in the industry long enough to become the default, one firm at a time.

Next time I’d want to know whether someone has the problem before I even talk to them. Keenan’s Gap Selling says it simply: sell to people who have a gap. And I’d go in knowing what I know now about this market. Firms with around 50 clients don’t see much value in it. “Send me a demo” is often a polite no, because these firms are used to buying software from sales calls and demos, and asking one to be a design partner is a much bigger ask than that. The firms already using AI are probably the best place to start. And I’d make a clear offer from the beginning, instead of asking for five minutes and seeing where it went.

I’d also keep in mind that a firm giving you five minutes, one handing over real files, one giving you an afternoon with their staff, one promising a referral, and one paying you are all different things.

The person who helped me most wasn’t a firm’s partner. It was the manager at the 120-client firm, who did the actual work, answered every question I asked, and gave me a little more access each time I came back.

After about four months, I could finally see how this industry actually works.