Working CA24 May 2026·12 min read
Closing GSTR-1 in 60 minutes — a working CA's checklist
A time-boxed checklist for filing GSTR-1 each month: eight steps in order, the place-of-supply audit, and the three places returns most often get stuck.
Author profile
CA Ayush Agarwal
Chartered Accountant. Co-founder of Tatva Fintech. Focused on SMB and CA-practice operations. Author of the Working CA series.
About
Ayush is a Chartered Accountant whose practice has focused on SMB and CA-firm operations. He has spent years inside the day-to-day rhythm of Indian businesses — month-end closes, GSTR-1 cycles, payroll runs, audit prep — and on the other side, helping CA firms turn the same rhythm into a repeatable, automatable workflow.
That dual view shapes how he thinks about accounting software. Most products are built for the end user — a business owner who needs an invoice raised. Few are built for the article clerk who has to enter 400 vouchers a month without breaking the audit trail. Fewer still are built for the CA partner signing off on returns at 11pm on the 11th, trusting that the data is internally consistent. TatvaBooks is built for all three.
His specific obsession: the moment of data entry. Most accounting products treat ledger selection as a free choice. If the software has no opinion about whether an interstate sale should be booked against a “Sales — Local” ledger, the partner's afternoon will be spent forensically tracing the mistake three weeks later. We disagreed with that design — and built the sale voucher to refuse the wrong post at the moment of entry.
What he writes about
Ayush leads the Working CA series on the TatvaBooks blog — pieces aimed at the practical operations of running a CA firm or a finance team:
- How a monthly GSTR-1 close should actually run (and how it doesn't, in most firms)
- Product-design notes on why we built things the way we did — the mismatch detector, period locks, the audit-trail discipline
- GST Live notes on regulatory changes affecting how SMB teams operate
Selected writing
Behind TatvaBooks18 May 2026·7 min read
The sales-ledger mismatch detector — and why your audit trail will thank us
Posting an interstate sale to a Sales — Local ledger silently corrupts your GSTR-1 B2B split. Here's how we block the wrong CGST/SGST-vs-IGST post at entry.
GST Live12 May 2026·6 min read
Six GST changes in FY 2026-27 every Indian SMB should know
GST 2.0 cut the slabs to 5%, 18% and 40% from 22 Sep 2025 — 12% and 28% are gone. Plus the ₹5cr e-Invoice threshold, Rule 37 ITC reversal and GSTR-9 limits.
On the product
Ayush owns the operational side of TatvaBooks — the workflows, the ergonomics of repeat actions, and the small frictions that cost article time. The period-lock discipline, the immutable voucher rule with paired cancellations, the GSTR-1 preview screen that reconciles before filing — these are his daily lens applied to product design.
If you want a sense of how he thinks about product, read the sales-ledger mismatch detector post — the design rationale for one of the features we're proudest of.
Connect
For sales or partnership questions, write to support@tatvabooks.com. For tax-content corrections on this site, write to support@tatvabooks.com.
Also on this site
Read CA Anil Agarwal's profile — co-founder, focused on audit, GST and indirect-tax.
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