Every practising CA I have spoken to has a version of the same story, and the details are always oddly similar. It is never the big client. It is never the deadline everyone was staring at. It is the small one — a company acquired mid-year, a branch with its own TDS obligation, a client who said they'd handle their own ROC filing and then didn't.
And the reckoning is always the same. The client asks how it happened. The honest answer is that it was never on the list. Which is a worse answer than "we forgot", because it means the list itself was the problem.
A calendar tells you what's due. A tracker tells you what's missing.
This is the distinction the software market keeps blurring. A calendar starts from a date and shows you the obligations attached to it. Useful, and completely blind to omission — a deadline nobody entered simply does not exist.
A tracker has to start from the other end: from the client. Every engagement carries a set of obligations that follow from what the client is. A private limited company with GST registration and employees owes GSTR-1, GSTR-3B, quarterly TDS statements, an annual return, ROC filings after the AGM, and an income tax return. Those obligations are derivable, not entered. If your system knows the client's constitution and registrations, it should be generating that obligation set itself and asking you to confirm it — not waiting for an article to remember.
The test is simple, and you can run it on whatever you use today. Onboard a client with a strange shape — say, a partnership firm with a branch in another state and one foreign remittance a year — and see whether the system produces the right obligation list on its own. If a human has to build it, you have a calendar.
What a miss actually costs
It is worth being unsentimental about the numbers, because they compound quietly:
- ROC forms carry an additional fee of ₹100 per day of delay, per form, with no upper cap. A form remembered a year late is ₹36,500 in additional fee alone before anyone argues about anything.
- A late GST return runs at ₹50 a day in late fee (₹25 CGST + ₹25 SGST), and tax paid late attracts interest at 18% per annum on the net liability.
- Late TDS statements and late deposit each carry their own fee and interest, and the deductee's credit is stuck until it's fixed.
- The bill nobody itemises: the client's confidence, and the six hours a partner spends unpicking it instead of billing.
Rates change; check the current position before you quote any of this to a client. The structural point does not change. The penalties are per-day, uncapped in places, and the discovery is usually late — which means the cost of a miss is a function of how long it stayed invisible. A tracker's job is to shorten that number to zero.
Treat every missed deadline as a near-miss malpractice event, and you will design very different software than if you treat it as an oops.
The tools you already own — and what they're for
I want to be careful here, because this is where most software companies start swinging. Genius from SAG Infotech, CompuTax and Winman are excellent at what they were built for: preparing and filing returns accurately, fast, at volume, with the schema quirks handled. Suvit and Vyapar's TaxOne are doing real work on the data-entry and automation side of the same job. If you file returns for a living, you already own one of these and you should keep it.
But notice what they are. They are filing engines. They are organised around the return — the form, the schema, the upload. They are not organised around the practice: which of my 340 clients has an obligation open right now, who in my team owns it, what stage is it at, is it billed, did the client send the documents, and what will an inspection of my own file look like in two years.
That is not a criticism. It is a boundary. The practice-level questions were simply never their job.
Run the practice, not just the returns
BizRevolt's CA workspace is deliberately not a filing tool. We are not going to out-Winman Winman, and we are not going to pretend we can. It is the layer above: the cockpit that sits over whatever filing engine you already trust.
Obligations derived from the client's registrations, so the list builds itself. A single board of everything open across ITR, GST, TDS and ROC, with an owner and a stage on each. Engagements with scope and fee. Time that becomes an invoice — SAC 998213, GST computed, sent — instead of unbilled WIP quietly dying in a notebook. A document vault the client can upload to, so "we're waiting on the client" becomes a status rather than a WhatsApp archaeology project. Roles that distinguish an article from a partner, and an audit trail that shows who did what and when, which is precisely the record you want if anyone ever asks.
₹1,499 a month for a solo practice, ₹4,999 for a firm. Published, no per-return metering, no implementation fee.
We are building this alongside practices who tell us where it still doesn't fit, and that feedback goes straight into the next release. If you want to argue with the obligation model — and you might, because your practice has a client shape ours hasn't met — call or WhatsApp me on +91 91 0657 4865. I answer, usually within about fifteen minutes.