TL;DR
Two Chartered Accountants built TatvaBooks after twenty years of practice on tools built for a tax regime that no longer exists. It puts India at the foundation rather than a localisation, makes the voucher screen first-class, and blocks the data-entry mistakes that quietly wreck a GSTR-1 at posting time.
Twenty years ago, when one of us first sat at an articleship desk, the software question was simple. Tally was on every PC in the office. Vouchers were posted on the keyboard. Returns were typed into a paper form, then later into a web portal. The work was hard. The tools were what they were.
Twenty years later, the work is harder. GST has rewritten the rules every six months for half a decade. e-Invoice thresholds have dropped five times. GSTR-2A became 2B. e-Way Bill, IRN, RCM under reverse charge, Section 16(4) ITC time limits, Rule 86A blocked credits. The MCA audit-trail mandate that forces an edit log on the books. The DPDP Act tightening how client data is handled. The work has changed completely.
The tools have not.
The problem we couldn't stop seeing
After two decades of practice — audits of growing companies, statutory filings for SMBs, GST returns through every iteration of the law since 2017 — we kept hitting the same three frustrations.
One. Every desktop product we used was built for a tax regime that no longer existed. e-Invoice was a plugin. 2B reconciliation was a separate tool. The audit-trail mandate (Companies Accounts Amendment Rules, 2021) needed a paid update from the reseller. Every CBIC circular shipped two weeks before the accounting software caught up.
Two. Every cloud product we tried treated India as a localisation pack. GSTIN was a custom field. Place-of-supply was a dropdown. Voucher entry was buried under "manual journals" three menus deep. Our articles, trained on voucher-style entry for years, slowed to a crawl.
Three. The person actually typing the invoices was never the CA. It was the owner's son at the front desk, the sales executive at the customer's site, the office assistant at end of day, the first-year article doing volume work. None of them knew what intrastate vs interstate meant. None of them should have had to. But every product on the market made them choose anyway.
We started writing this down in 2023. By 2024, the document had become a list of fifty product decisions we wished an Indian accounting product would make. By 2025, we'd stopped writing and started building.
What we set out to build
Three principles, each a direct reaction to twenty years of CA practice.
1. India is the foundation, not a localisation
GSTIN is the primary identifier. Place-of-supply auto-detects from it. The e-Invoice IRN/QR payload is prepared inline with the voucher post — sandbox-tested today, ready for live filing as the beta matures. RCM is a checkbox on the invoice itself. The product has no "global mode" to fight against, because there is no global mode.
2. The voucher screen comes first
Sale voucher, purchase, receipt, payment, contra, journal — these are first-class workflows. F8 opens a new sales voucher. Ctrl+Enter posts it. The right rail shows the journal entry as it will post — the convention every voucher-fluent CA already trusts. We refuse to hide it behind an "invoice" abstraction.
3. The person who can't make mistakes shouldn't have to make decisions
The system picks the right sales ledger from the customer's GSTIN. The system picks CGST+SGST or IGST from the place of supply. The system blocks a wrong-ledger sale at posting — not at reconciliation, not at filing, at posting. The mistakes that ruin a GSTR-1 are the mistakes we made impossible.
The private beta
TatvaBooks is in private beta with about fifty founding teams — Indian CA firms, SMB owners, freelancers. We deliberately decided to grow slowly. Each beta partner gets onboarded personally by one of us. We write down every feedback comment. We ship updates fortnightly.
It is the most fun either of us has had in our careers.
If you have been wishing for a long time that Indian accounting software would catch up to what your practice actually does — write to us. The beta has space for fifty more. If you'd rather see how we line up against the global cloud products first, here's the honest comparison.
— Anil