Aalekh: Practice Management for Indian CAs

Partners argue about Aalekh less over features and more over arithmetic, and the arithmetic has two halves. The firm-side Team Plan is ₹20,000 a year for up to 10 users billed yearly, with extra users at ₹1,500 per user per year. The client-side portal is a separate ₹99 per client login per month — so twenty client logins is a modest line item and two hundred is a budget conversation. Aalekh is an AI practice management and GST/ITR filing platform for CA firms (https://www.aalekh.ai/), sitting across practice-management and gst-filing. The platform covers GST filing for GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B, GSTR-2A/2B reconciliation, ITR filing management, invoice data extraction, and a financial dashboard. Key features echo the same: one-click GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B filing, automated GSTR-2A/2B reconciliation, ITR filing with status tracking and deadline alerts, AI invoice data extraction, multi-client dashboard, plus revenue, expense and cash-flow tracking. Platforms are web. The public integration focus is GSTN. Onboarding is free; the vendor does not currently advertise a time-boxed free trial. Featured in this directory for firms that want filing and visibility in one pane rather than five spreadsheets.

Monday morning without a lying spreadsheet is the operating bet. The multi-client dashboard should show who still needs GSTR-1, who is stuck on 2A/2B mismatches, and which ITR deadlines are coming. Scanned invoices and phone photos go through AI extraction so data entry is not pure typing. Revenue, expense, and cash-flow views sit beside compliance status for firms that also want a light financial pulse per client. That combination — filing widgets plus practice visibility — is aimed at Indian Chartered Accountants and SMEs managing compliance across many clients. It is not marketed as a deep Tally posting engine. Public materials do not tell a rich Tally automation story. If ledger automation into Tally is your bottleneck, start in the bookkeeping automation aisle of this directory. If you already run a heavily customised practice management system, Aalekh must beat habit, not win a feature bake-off on slides.

The client-portal add-on has a quiet trap: dormant clients still cost ₹99 a month each until someone prunes the roster. Model annual cost at active-client count, not total names in your WhatsApp groups, and include ITR season when headcount and urgency spike. Multiply ₹1,188 a year by the client logins you will actually use, add the ₹20,000 team seat block, then add the partner time to onboard. Deadline alerts help only if a human owns the red rows. Nominate a weekly compliance captain who clears mismatches and escalates clients who never send invoices. Teach clients a boring photography rule for AI extraction: flat surface, bright light, four corners visible. Measure extraction fix-time on ugly files, not demo PDFs, before you commit to a year. Use ITR status tracking as a control log beside portal acknowledgements, not instead of them. Status green in a dashboard is not a substitute for the acknowledgement number in your working papers.

Credential and data handling deserve a direct conversation. When a platform files on a client’s behalf via GSTN, ask how GST credentials and financials are stored, who can export them, and what happens when you leave. Phrase the privacy check as operational hygiene: can you revoke access per staff member, and can you pull a client’s filing history if you migrate. One-click GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B filing sounds efficient; still keep a pre-submit review step with a named senior for material GSTINs so speed does not become silent error.

Versus Finexo, Aalekh leans filing widgets with a flat team seat block plus per-client portal logins; Finexo leans tasks, WhatsApp ops, and capacity-banded annual plans. Pick the pain first. If your fire is chasing documents and task ownership, a filing-heavy dashboard alone will not save you. If your fire is GSTR-1/3B volume plus 2A/2B recon across many GSTINs with ITR status in the same pane, Aalekh’s shape matches. Test on ugly files and a realistic client count. Give portal logins only to clients who will actually use them, so ₹99 a month is not applied by inertia to every name on the books. Best for CA firms managing GST and ITR compliance across many clients who want one dashboard — provided someone still owns the red rows after the logo is paid for.