Do you need a CA, or just an accountant?

Chartered Accountant

A member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. Qualified by examination and articleship, carries a membership number, and needs a Certificate of Practice to practise. Certain audits and attestations can be signed by nobody else.

Accountant or bookkeeper

Records transactions, maintains ledgers, reconciles bank statements, raises invoices, runs payroll. Often a commerce graduate, sometimes semi qualified. The title is unregulated, so experience and references are the only evidence available.

Tax consultant or tax practitioner

A description of what someone does, not a qualification. Some are CAs, many are not. Perfectly capable of preparing and filing routine returns. Cannot sign anything reserved for a Chartered Accountant.

GST practitioner

A specific enrolment under GST law that permits filing on a taxpayer's behalf. Narrow and real. It covers GST work and does not extend to audit, income tax attestation, or company law matters.

Company Secretary and Cost Accountant

Separate professions with their own institutes and their own reserved work. A CS handles company law and ROC compliance. Neither is a substitute for a CA, and a CA is not a substitute for them.

Some work is reserved by law. Nobody else can sign it, whatever they charge and however experienced they are.

• A statutory audit of a company under the Companies Act.
• A tax audit under the Income Tax Act, once your turnover or profit declaration crosses the applicable threshold. The threshold changes, so confirm the current one rather than trusting a number you read somewhere.
• Most certificates a bank, an investor or a government department asks for, including net worth certificates and turnover certificates.
• Attestation of financial statements where a lender, a tender or a regulator requires it.
• Special audits and reports required under GST or other statutes in specific situations.

Everything below can be done competently by a good accountant, and routinely is. There is no legal requirement for a CA anywhere in this list.

• Day to day bookkeeping and ledger maintenance.
• Bank and vendor reconciliation.
• Invoicing, receivables chasing and payables scheduling.
• Payroll processing, payslips, and the routine monthly deposits that go with it.
• Preparing and filing routine GST returns.
• Preparing and filing a straightforward income tax return.
• TDS deduction, deposit and quarterly returns.
• Keeping registrations and records current.

This is where money leaks. Paying a Chartered Accountant's rate for monthly data entry is common, and in most cases the data entry is being done by a junior in that practice anyway. You are paying for a signature on work that needs no signature.

Between the two lists is a band of work where a CA is not required but is usually worth it, because the cost of getting it wrong is much larger than the fee.

Choosing a structure

Proprietorship, LLP, private limited. The decision affects tax, liability, funding and how hard it is to change later. Cheap to get advice on, expensive to reverse.

Responding to a notice

A department notice is not paperwork, it is a position you are taking. Take advice before you reply, not after.

Anything cross border

Exports, imports, foreign remittances, services billed overseas, FEMA questions. The rules are unforgiving and the penalties are not small.

A year that changed shape

A funding round, a large asset sale, a restructuring, a first year of profit after losses. One conversation before year end is worth more than any amount of correction after it.

Cleaning up a backlog

Several years of missed or inconsistent filings need someone who can judge what to fix, in what order, and what to disclose. This is not bookkeeping.

Once a business is past its first year or two, the usual answer is both, in different proportions.

An accountant, in house or outsourced, keeps the books current, files the routine returns and handles payroll. A Chartered Accountant handles the audit if there is one, reviews the year, signs what needs signing, and is the person you call before a decision rather than after it.

That split usually costs less than putting everything with one senior professional, and produces better books, because the routine work gets steady attention instead of being squeezed into filing season.

Accmeet lists both. Chartered Accountants and accountants are on the same network, and the difference between them is visible rather than implied.

• A gold Verified CA badge means that person passed an ICAI membership check against official records. It is only ever shown where the check passed.
• Every profile lists the work that person actually does, so you can filter for GST returns, bookkeeping, payroll, audit, registration or advisory rather than guessing from a job title.
• You can describe the work first and let people quote against it, which is the quickest way to find out whether what you need is a signature or a pair of hands.

Start by browsing the network, or read what the badge does and does not cover in the verification explainer.