A filing season, from an empty roll to a filed return

1 Register the firm

A firm name and an admin email address. A one-time code confirms the address and you are in, with a 30-day trial running and nothing held back during it. Your firm’s database is created at this point — it is not a row added to someone else’s.

In firm settings you fill in what the department will ask for on every return anyway: the firm’s PAN, ICAI membership number, UDIN prefix, and ERI or TRP identifiers. They go into the verification block of every JSON the software generates, so this is the only time they are typed.

2 Add the client roll

A client is a PAN, a name and an assessee type — individual, HUF, firm, LLP, AOP, BOI, local authority, AJP or co-operative society. The type decides the form: individuals and HUFs go through the form selector, and the firm-class types file ITR-5.

The faster route is the file the client already has. Upload the ITR JSON they filed last year and the client record comes out of it, along with the comparative figures and the brought-forward losses. See last year’s return as the starting point.

3 Import what the client sends

Form 16, Form 12BB, Form 26AS, the AIS including the encrypted download, a bank statement, a profit-and-loss workbook. Each file’s PAN and period is matched against the open client before anything is read; a mismatch is refused outright.

Then the documents are reconciled against each other rather than merged. Where the 26AS and the Form 16 disagree on TDS, you are shown the difference and told which document is authoritative — and on a salary disagreement the choice is yours to make, not the software’s to make quietly.

4 Prepare the return, head by head

Imported figures arrive as a proposal, head by head, and each head is confirmed before it becomes part of the return. Salary, house property, capital gains, business or profession, other sources; then Chapter VI-A, exempt income and the carry-forwards. Which schedules open is decided by the form.

A totals page comes before the computation, so no return is built out of figures nobody looked at.

5 Compare the regimes and decide

For an individual or HUF return, the old and the new regime are both computed from the same figures and shown side by side with the difference in tax. The firm records the choice; the software does not assume it. An ITR-5 is computed once, at its single rate.

6 Produce the output and file

Three things come out. The computation of income, which is the sheet the client reads and signs off. The CBDT form PDF, where the department publishes one for that return. And the e-filing JSON, which is checked against CBDT’s own schema before the download is allowed wherever that schema is published — ITR-1 and ITR-4 for AY 2026-27 — so a file the portal would reject does not reach you. Where no schema is published, the download says the check could not run rather than telling you it passed.

Your firm uploads and verifies it on the e-filing portal under its own credentials. Mark the return filed on the dashboard and the client moves out of the pending count.