Last week, I sat across from Priya—a brilliant startup founder I’ve known for three years. She was literally on her third coffee of the morning, looking defeated. “I just spent two hours trying to send one GST-compliant invoice with a payment link,” she said. “The file wouldn’t export, UPI wasn’t working, and my client’s still…
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Last month, I was consulting with Priya, a startup founder in Bangalore who’d been using a basic spreadsheet to manage her growing e-commerce business. “Mohnish,” she said, clearly frustrated, “I spent three hours last night trying to figure out my GST returns, and I’m still not sure I got it right. My chartered accountant friend…
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I wasted three weeks last year helping a client migrate from Vyapar to something that could handle their growth. What looked simple on paper—invoicing, inventory, GST compliance—turned into a maze of hidden costs, migration headaches, and feature gaps. If you’re running a small business or startup and hitting Vyapar’s limits, you don’t need another generic…
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Finding the Right Sleek Bill Alternative: A Founder’s Guide to Better Invoicing Software Tuesday, 7:40 a.m. A founder called me: “We close our next funding round in 10 days—what’s the fastest way to get professional invoicing working without breaking our workflow?” This isn’t the first time I’ve fielded this question. As a chartered accountant who’s…
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I’ll never forget the chaos of my first tax season after GST implementation. Picture this: it’s 2 AM, I’m surrounded by coffee cups and crumpled receipts, frantically trying to reconcile invoices that my client had been creating in Excel. Half the invoices were missing HSN codes, the tax calculations were all over the place, and…
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I’ll never forget the morning I realized I’d been losing money on every invoice I sent. It was 2024, and I was working with a small manufacturing client who’d been using a “free” invoicing tool for two years. We were reviewing their books when I noticed something alarming – their average payment time was 47…
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I wasted weeks picking accounting tools when I started my first business. Demos looked perfect; real work was chaos. If you’re a startup founder drowning in spreadsheets and chasing invoices, here’s what I wish I’d known on day one—the truth about which tools actually deliver when the invoices, deadlines, and investor questions pile up. …
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When I first started advising small business owners on billing software, I made the same mistake most of us do—I assumed all invoicing tools worked the same way. Then I watched three different clients try to export their data during busy season. One took five minutes; another required a support ticket that lasted two days;…
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When Manufacturing Dreams Meet Accounting Nightmares I’ll be honest with you. Three years ago, I nearly lost a manufacturing client because I recommended the wrong accounting software. The owner of a textile manufacturing unit in Chennai called me at 10 PM, frustrated beyond belief: “Mohnish, we can’t track our raw material costs, GST returns…
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