A trial balance exists year-round
Instead of building one from scratch at year-end from loose notebook entries, the trial balance is already current and ready for the CA to review whenever it's needed.
Coming soonBookkeeping Preparation Assistant
Maintain 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.
Works with
What it does
How Khata handles this
Khata posts each confirmed transaction (invoice, expense, payment, receipt) to the appropriate ledger accounts using a standard chart of accounts, keeping debits and credits balanced automatically. The owner sees a running ledger and trial balance at all times, ready for the CA to review and adjust.
A trader who has run their business on a notebook and a rough Excel sheet for years has never actually seen a trial balance — sales go in one column, expenses in another, and whether the two sides of any transaction actually balance is not something a single-entry sheet was ever built to reveal. When the CA asks for a trial balance at year-end, building one from a year of loose entries takes days neither of them wanted to spend on it.
The ledger keeps every confirmed sale, purchase, payment, and receipt posted to proper double-entry accounts, using a standard chart of accounts, with debits and credits kept balanced automatically as each transaction lands. The owner sees a running ledger and trial balance at all times — not a finished set of accounts, but a properly structured starting point the CA can work from instead of rebuilding it first.
Where maintain the day-to-day ledger 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
Confirmed transactions post automatically
Once an invoice, expense, payment, or receipt is confirmed, it's converted into a journal entry against the appropriate ledger accounts using a standard chart of accounts, without any manual debit-and-credit entry from the owner having to type it in themselves.
- 02
Debits and credits stay balanced
Every posting keeps both sides of the entry balanced by construction, so the running ledger never drifts into the kind of one-sided imbalance a manual notebook entry could easily introduce and nobody would ever quite notice.
- 03
Trial balance updates continuously
A running trial balance recalculates as new entries post, so the owner or CA can check the current balance position at any point in the year, not only when someone sits down to build one from scratch.
- 04
Unusual entries flag for CA review
A large one-off amount, a new account type, or an adjusting entry is flagged rather than posted unattended, so anything outside routine, day-to-day transactions waits for the CA's own approval before it lands anywhere in the books.
Why it matters
What you get out of it
No one-sided entries slip through
Automatic double-entry posting keeps debits and credits balanced by construction, closing off the kind of quiet imbalance a manual single-entry sheet had no way to catch.
CA starts from structure
A standard chart of accounts already in place means the CA reviews and adjusts a properly structured ledger, rather than spending the first day organising it.
The detail
What to know before you rely on it
Double-entry posting is the structural backbone every other capability in Khata sits on top of — the GST summary, the draft financial statements, the cash-flow dashboard all read from this ledger, so its accuracy determines everything downstream. Routine transactions post automatically once confirmed, which is what makes a running trial balance possible without the owner or the CA doing the posting arithmetic by hand for every sale and purchase across the year.
What counts as "routine" is deliberately narrow. A regular sale, a recurring payment, a normal receipt — these post without waiting for sign-off. A large one-off amount, a transaction that doesn't fit the chart of accounts, or an adjusting entry is held for the CA's approval instead, because a wrong classification — capital expenditure booked as revenue, say — is the mistake only a trained eye catches. Automatic posting handles volume, not judgement calls.
The ledger itself makes no claim beyond being an accurate, current record of confirmed transactions. It is not an audited set of accounts, and the trial balance it produces at any moment is not a finished financial statement — it's the input a CA reviews, adjusts, and builds the actual period-end statements from. For a business that has never had a real double-entry ledger before, the change isn't that the books become someone else's responsibility; it's that the CA's first day on a period starts from something structured, instead of a notebook never built to show whether two sides of any entry agreed.
Industry use cases
Where this earns its keep
12 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 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 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 moreMatch bank transactions to books
The owner can see at a glance which bank transactions already match a recorded invoice or expense, and which ones still need attention.
Learn moreQuestions
Straight answers.
Does a balanced trial balance mean my books are correct and complete?
A balanced trial balance only confirms that debits and credits match arithmetically — it doesn't confirm every transaction was classified correctly, that nothing is missing, or that the figures are ready to file on. It's the starting point your CA reviews and adjusts from, not a finished or audited set of accounts on its own, and it never claims to be either.
Does everything I confirm get posted to the ledger immediately without review?
Routine, everyday, day-to-day transactions post automatically once confirmed without delay. Anything unusual — a large one-off amount, a new type of account, or what looks like an adjusting entry — is flagged and held for your CA to approve first, rather than posting unattended, precisely because these are the entries most likely to need a trained professional's judgement applied before they're accepted.
What if an expense gets classified under the wrong account type?
A wrong chart-of-accounts mapping, such as booking a capital purchase as a revenue expense by mistake, is exactly the kind of error only a CA reliably catches during a careful review, which is exactly one good reason the ledger surfaces a running trial balance for the CA to check regularly, rather than treating any single automatic posting as final on its own.
How long do I need to keep my ledger and supporting records?
Books of account and the vouchers supporting them generally need to be retained for a minimum of eight years, under MCA Rule 3(1). Khata's immutable audit trail is built around that same retention window, so the record of what was posted, when, and by whom stays available for exactly as long as any authority may genuinely need to see it.
The rest of your stack
It plugs into what you already run.
Khata connects to your tools
No rip-and-replace — maintain the day-to-day ledger works alongside the systems already running your business.
- Razorpay
- Stripe
- Paytm
- PhonePe
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Shopify
- Amazon
Coming soon