Form 16, 26AS and AIS import — reconciled, not retyped

What goes in

Form 16 — Part A for the TDS and Part B for the salary breakup, read out of the PDF the employer issued.
Form 12BB — the declarations the employee gave the employer, which is where the HRA and interest claims come from.
Form 26AS — the tax credit statement: TDS, TCS, advance tax and self-assessment tax against the PAN.
The AIS — the Annual Information Statement, in JSON or PDF, including the password-protected download the portal produces.
A profit-and-loss workbook — for a business client, from a template you download, filled in and read back.

Two rules the import obeys

1. The PAN and the period are checked first

Before any figure is read, the file’s PAN and assessment year are matched against the client you have open. A mismatch is refused. There is no warn-and-proceed: the cost of importing one client’s AIS into another client’s return is not a warning-level cost.

2. The documents are reconciled against each other

Reconciliation does not merge three files into a pile. Each figure has a document that is authoritative for it — 26AS for tax deducted, the AIS for gross receipts, Form 16 for the salary breakup — and where two documents disagree the difference is raised rather than silently resolved. Inside the AIS, a line reported both as a TDS entry and as an SFT entry is deduplicated before it is compared with 26AS at all.

Nothing is final until you say so. An import is provisional. Figures arrive head by head, you confirm each head, and the totals page comes before the computation — so no return is ever built out of numbers nobody looked at.

And a record of all of it

Each import is written to the client’s import log with its source, what it contained, and the decision taken on it. A line can be kept, undone, or excluded with the reason attached. When a figure is questioned a year later, that log is the answer.

Questions

Which documents can be imported?

Form 16 (Part A and Part B), Form 12BB, Form 26AS, and the Annual Information Statement — including the password-protected download the portal gives you. A Schedule BP profit-and-loss workbook can be imported from a template as well.

What happens when 26AS and Form 16 disagree?

You are told, before the figure reaches the return. Reconciliation runs the documents against each other and raises the differences; the TDS in 26AS and the gross in the AIS are the versions that win a disagreement, because those are the ones the department is holding.

Can I import a file belonging to another client by mistake?

No. Every uploaded file's PAN and period are checked against the client you have open before a single figure is read, and a mismatch is refused outright rather than warned about. It is the one validation in the product with no proceed-anyway button.

Is there a record of what was imported?

Every import is logged against the client with what it contained and what you decided to do with it — keep it, undo it, or exclude a line. That log is what you show when a figure is questioned a year later.

Three documents, one set of figures