A performance picture without waiting
A retailer gets a running sense of how the quarter is actually going from a real draft P&L, instead of waiting for a year-end visit to find out.
Coming soonBookkeeping Preparation Assistant
Draft P&L and balance sheet
The owner sees a clear, plain-language profit & loss statement and balance sheet reflecting their business's period performance, ready for the CA's review and finalization.
Works with
What it does
How Khata handles this
Khata compiles the ledger into a draft profit & loss statement and balance sheet using standard formats, updating as new transactions are confirmed. The draft is explicitly labeled as unaudited and pending CA review, never as a final or certified statement.
A home décor retailer wants a rough sense of how the business actually performed this quarter, beyond a gut feeling from watching the till, but has never had a proper profit and loss statement — just a ledger of transactions with no summary ever pulled together from it. Waiting for the CA's year-end visit to find out is a long time to run a business on instinct alone, without any real number in hand.
Financial statement drafting compiles the ledger into a draft P&L and balance sheet using standard formats, updating as new transactions are confirmed throughout the period. Every draft carries a persistent, unremovable "Unaudited — prepared for CA review" label — Khata has no way to strip that label off or present a statement as final, audited, or certified, because it never is either of those things until the CA has done that separate work.
Where draft p&l and balance sheet happens
Khata runs this directly on the platforms your customers already use — no separate app for them to install.
- QuickBooks
- Xero
- Google Sheets
- Zoho
How it works
Step by step
- 01
Ledger compiles into standard formats
The statement compiler reads the confirmed ledger and organises it into a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet, following standard formats rather than an ad hoc layout the owner would have to build from scratch.
- 02
Draft updates as transactions confirm
Each newly confirmed transaction feeds into the draft statement, so the P&L and balance sheet reflect the period's activity up to the current moment, rather than refreshing only at a scheduled month-end review, days after activity actually happened.
- 03
Unaudited label stays on every version
Every draft statement, at every stage, carries a persistent "Unaudited — prepared for CA review" label that cannot be removed or hidden, regardless of how clean, complete, or genuinely finished the underlying numbers actually happen to appear.
- 04
CA reviews and finalises separately
The CA reviews the draft, makes whatever adjustments are needed, and produces the actual final statement through their own professional process — a step that happens entirely outside Khata, on the CA's own separate professional systems and letterhead.
Why it matters
What you get out of it
Labelling that can't be forgotten
The persistent unaudited label means nobody, including the owner, can present or mistake a draft statement as something finished, audited, or ready to hand to a bank.
Numbers update continuously
The draft reflects confirmed transactions continuously, so the owner isn't working from a stale, month-old snapshot when checking how the business is actually doing right now.
The detail
What to know before you rely on it
The persistent unaudited label is not a formality here — it's arguably the single most important thing this capability produces. A business owner mistaking an unaudited draft for a bank-ready or investor-ready statement is a direct, serious boundary risk, because a clean-looking draft can easily be mistaken for something finished. Khata has no mechanism anywhere to remove that label or present a statement as final, audited, or certified — this isn't a setting an owner could accidentally toggle off.
Accuracy here is entirely inherited from everything that happened earlier in the books, without exception. The draft P&L and balance sheet are only as reliable as every upstream ledger entry, categorisation, and reconciliation that fed into them — a wrong expense category, an unreconciled bank line, or a stale stock valuation surfaces directly in the draft's numbers, because the compiler organises what's already there rather than verifying it. This is why the draft is explicitly framed as a starting point for the CA's review, not a finished product.
What a home décor retailer, or any small business owner, gains from this is a genuinely useful operational view — a running sense of profit and loss checked without waiting for a scheduled CA visit. What they don't gain is a substitute for the CA's actual work. The final, audited, or certified version of any financial statement is produced by the CA through their own professional process, on their own systems, and that process is where genuine attestation happens — Khata's draft is the organised starting material that process begins from.
Industry use cases
Where this earns its keep
13 industries where Khata applies this directly.
Khata organizes spare-parts purchase bills and service-invoice GST data into a return-ready summary, so a dealer or garage owner's CA can file GSTR-1/3B without re-keying from paper bills.
A car service center owner photographs a stack of spare-parts supplier invoices at month-end, Khata extracts the HSN codes and tax amounts from each, and the owner's CA opens the shared workspace to review the compiled purchase summary before filing.
See the automotive playbookKhata prepares TDS worksheets on vendor and contractor payments alongside the GST purchase-matching report, so a distributor's CA has both compliance threads ready in one place each month.
A wholesale distributor pays several transport contractors during the month, and Khata flags which payments likely crossed the TDS threshold for Section 194C, compiling a worksheet the CA reviews before determining the actual deduction and filing.
See the b2b sales playbookKhata maintains an immutable, audit-trail-backed ledger and draft financial statements for a small NBFC or finance intermediary, giving their CA and statutory auditor a clean starting point that already satisfies the mandatory edit-log requirement.
A small lending intermediary's CA needs to confirm the edit-log audit trail has been continuously active all year before signing the Rule 11(g) audit trail reporting requirement, and pulls the full log directly from Khata's audit trail view rather than requesting IT logs separately.
See the banking and finance playbookKhata tracks product inventory purchases and retail sales together so a salon-and-retail combo business has a correct closing stock valuation feeding into its draft P&L.
A beauty product retailer sells both services and boxed skincare products, and Khata separates the two revenue streams in the ledger while calculating a consistent closing valuation for the unsold stock ahead of the CA's year-end review.
See the beauty and cosmetics playbookKhata organizes subscription and course-fee receipts alongside vendor payments to instructors, preparing a clean revenue and expense summary for a CA to review each quarter.
An online tutoring business receives course-fee payments through multiple gateways during the month, and Khata reconciles each gateway payout against recorded receivables so the CA sees one consolidated income summary instead of three separate statements.
See the education playbookKhata captures client invoices and business expenses in one simple ledger so an independent consultant has GST and income records organized without hiring a full-time bookkeeper.
A freelance designer invoices three clients in a month and photographs a handful of software-subscription receipts, and Khata compiles both sides into a period summary the freelancer forwards to their CA before the quarterly GST filing.
See the freelancers and consultants playbookKhata reconciles patient-billing receipts and supplier purchases (medical supplies, equipment) into a clean ledger, respecting that patient PII in billing records needs the same access control as any other financial document.
A physiotherapy clinic owner uploads a batch of supplier invoices for consumables, and Khata extracts amounts and HSN codes while keeping patient names on any attached billing documents restricted to the clinic's own staff and CA, not broadly visible in reports.
See the health and wellness playbookKhata handles multi-branch stock valuation and e-way bill data preparation for a home-decor retailer shipping larger items across state lines.
A furniture retailer with showrooms in two states ships a large order that crosses the e-way bill value threshold, and Khata pre-fills the consignment and HSN details from the invoice so the dispatch team only needs to generate the bill itself on the government portal.
See the home decor and furnishing playbookKhata prepares TDS worksheets for payments to freelance creators and vendors, and organizes retainer-invoice records, for an agency's CA to finalize each month.
A marketing agency pays several freelance video editors as contractors during a campaign, and Khata's TDS worksheet flags the professional-fee payments likely requiring deduction under Section 194J for the CA's review before the agency deducts and deposits tax.
See the marketing agencies playbookKhata consolidates multi-GSTIN books across a real-estate firm's project entities while keeping each project's return-ready summary properly separated for its own filing.
A real-estate broker running two project-specific entities under separate GSTINs views a consolidated cash-position dashboard for planning, while their CA still receives two entirely separate GST summaries, one per GSTIN, for filing.
See the real estate playbookKhata values daily-changing food and beverage stock for the books and reconciles POS settlement receipts against the bank statement each day.
A restaurant owner's UPI and card settlements land in the bank account a day after the sale, and Khata's reconciliation queue matches each day's POS batch total against the corresponding bank credit, flagging any settlement that hasn't landed within the expected window.
See the restaurants and food playbookKhata tracks retail product inventory alongside service revenue and prepares a combined GST summary reflecting both goods and services HSN/SAC codes.
A spa sells packaged skincare products in addition to treatments, and Khata applies the correct HSN code to product line items and the correct SAC code to service line items on the same invoice, keeping the tax split accurate for the CA's review.
See the spas and salons playbookKhata organizes multi-vendor purchase bills (transport, accommodation, package suppliers) and prepares the GSTR-2A/2B purchase-matching report so a travel agent's ITC claims are backed by verified supplier filings.
A travel agency books hotel and transport packages from several vendors for a client tour, and Khata's purchase-matching report shows which of those vendor invoices are already reflected in GSTR-2B, letting the CA hold back ITC claims on the ones that aren't yet visible.
See the travel and tourism playbookMore from Khata
Everything else it handles
Capture receipts by photo or email
A business owner stops losing paper receipts because every bill is captured the moment it's created, from a phone camera, a forwarded email, or a bulk upload.
Learn moreExtract line items from documents
The owner no longer types out every item, date, vendor, and amount from a receipt by hand — Khata reads it and fills the fields.
Learn moreDraft gst-ready sales invoices
The business creates invoices that already carry the correct GSTIN, HSN/SAC code, and tax split so nothing needs re-keying at return time.
Learn moreMaintain the day-to-day ledger
Every sale, purchase, payment, and receipt lands in a proper double-entry ledger instead of a loose spreadsheet or paper khata.
Learn moreKeep a tamper-proof change log
Every edit to the books is permanently recorded with who changed what and when, satisfying the statutory requirement companies already face.
Learn moreAuto-sort expenses into categories
Expenses land in the right category (rent, salaries, supplies, utilities) automatically instead of the owner deciding from scratch every time.
Learn moreQuestions
Straight answers.
Can I show the draft P&L Khata produces to my bank as proof of my business's financial position?
The draft carries a persistent "Unaudited — prepared for CA review" label that can't be removed, precisely because it isn't a certified or final statement a bank would typically require for its own purposes. Speak to your CA about what your bank actually needs — a certified statement is produced through the CA's own professional process, separately from this draft entirely.
Why does every version of my draft statement say 'unaudited', even after months of use?
Because it genuinely is unaudited until your CA reviews it and produces a final version through their own process — the label reflects the actual status of the document, not a placeholder that eventually goes away by itself. Khata has no mechanism to remove or hide it, which is intentional, so nobody, including the owner, mistakes a draft for something it genuinely isn't yet.
If my draft P&L looks wrong, where's the mistake likely coming from?
The draft compiles from your ledger, so an error usually traces back to something upstream — a miscategorised expense, an unreconciled bank transaction, or a closing stock valuation that hasn't been updated recently. Checking those earlier stages, ideally with your CA, is usually far more productive than assuming the compiled statement itself somehow introduced the error somewhere along the way.
How often does the draft statement update?
The compiler runs on ledger changes or on demand, so the draft reflects confirmed transactions as they're posted rather than only refreshing on a fixed monthly schedule set in advance. This gives an owner a current view of period performance at any point, though it remains a draft pending the CA's own review regardless of exactly when it last happened to update.
The rest of your stack
It plugs into what you already run.
Khata connects to your tools
No rip-and-replace — draft p&l and balance sheet works alongside the systems already running your business.
- Razorpay
- Stripe
- Paytm
- PhonePe
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Shopify
- Amazon
Coming soon