For everyone who dreads March. Snap a receipt and CleanTab reads the amount, date, merchant and GST. Import your bank statement and it works out which deposits are really income, and says why it left the rest out, so a family transfer is never taxed like a client payment. Real Indian tax, both regimes, 44ADA, advance-tax dates. It all lives in your own Google Drive, with no trackers and no CleanTab copy of your money. 14 days of Pro free. Mobile only, where receipts happen.
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Maker
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If you earn on your own in India, you know the March feeling. The camera-roll archaeology at midnight. The forty WhatsApp forwards to your CA. And then the number, always bigger than the one you had been carrying in your head, always too late to do anything about it. That knot in your stomach is not a character flaw. Your tools were built for someone else's tax system.
I built CleanTab because I was tired of feeling it every year. The moment it became a real product was during beta, when it scared one of our first users with a tax bill that did not exist.
They imported a year of their bank statement and the app said they owed ₹2,44,111. Their accountant looked at the same statement and said zero. Of about ₹24 lakh credited that year, under ₹10 lakh was real professional income. The rest was family sending money, a loan arriving, a credit card being paid off, money moving between their own accounts. To software, all of it looks like income. And that is the exact fear, isn't it? That somewhere in the maths, you are quietly paying tax on money that was never income at all. Watching my own app hand a real person that false number is the day this stopped being a side project.
So that became the rule the whole app is built on: every deposit has to earn its place in your income, and CleanTab shows you the reason, in plain words, for everything it counted and everything it left out. Your salary is recognised as salary, so a job plus side clients never gets the same money taxed twice. When it cannot tell, it does not guess. It leaves the deposit out and asks you.
And the other quiet fear, the one every finance app asks you to swallow: what happens to my data? Here, nothing to swallow. Your receipts and records live in your own Google Drive, not in my database. The app can only see files it created. There are no trackers in it, none. If you stop using CleanTab tomorrow, everything stays exactly where it is, as normal files you can open.
Come March, one share gives your CA read-only, time-boxed access to the year's folder: the photos, the spreadsheets, and a typeset report with your name and PAN on the title page. You hand over one link instead of a month of guilt.
It is early version, a month live with 10 invited users, built for myself first. Mobile only, on purpose, because receipts happen standing at a counter, not at a desk.
I will be here all day. Tell me your worst March story. Ask me anything, including where it falls short.
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A small thing that would actually save me time - could you add a quick way to flag recurring monthly expenses (like rent or subscriptions) so they get auto-categorized on every new statement instead of me tagging them each time
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Maker
@hayden_su Fair ask, and it's exactly the kind of small thing that decides whether an app saves you time or just moves the work around. It doesn't do that today, you would still be tagging them each month. Persistent per-merchant rules, so a landlord or a subscription categorises itself on every future statement, is the obvious fix and it's going on the list. Thanks for being specific about it. "Rent and subscriptions, every statement" is a much easier thing to build against than "better categorisation".
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honestly this looks solid for someone like me who hates doing taxes. one thing though, it would be really helpful if you could auto remind me about advance tax deadlines with a quick notification, like maybe a week before each due date, so i dont end up scrambling last minute.
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Maker
@lennart_chan You and me both. The advance tax dates are in the app, and you can pull them into your own calendar so the reminder arrives somewhere you already look. A nudge from the app itself a week before each instalment is the version you're describing, and it's the better one.
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The fact that everything lives in your own Google Drive instead of a third-party server is a really thoughtful move, especially for something handling sensitive tax data.
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Maker
@ecommercepro Thank you. It was the first decision I made and the one I would defend hardest. The scope is drive.file, so the app only ever sees files it created and never the rest of your Drive. The side effect I like most is that leaving costs you nothing. Stop using CleanTab tomorrow and every receipt and spreadsheet is still sitting in your Drive exactly where it was.
A small thing that would actually save me time - could you add a quick way to flag recurring monthly expenses (like rent or subscriptions) so they get auto-categorized on every new statement instead of me tagging them each time
@hayden_su Fair ask, and it's exactly the kind of small thing that decides whether an app saves you time or just moves the work around. It doesn't do that today, you would still be tagging them each month. Persistent per-merchant rules, so a landlord or a subscription categorises itself on every future statement, is the obvious fix and it's going on the list. Thanks for being specific about it. "Rent and subscriptions, every statement" is a much easier thing to build against than "better categorisation".
honestly this looks solid for someone like me who hates doing taxes. one thing though, it would be really helpful if you could auto remind me about advance tax deadlines with a quick notification, like maybe a week before each due date, so i dont end up scrambling last minute.
@lennart_chan You and me both. The advance tax dates are in the app, and you can pull them into your own calendar so the reminder arrives somewhere you already look. A nudge from the app itself a week before each instalment is the version you're describing, and it's the better one.
The fact that everything lives in your own Google Drive instead of a third-party server is a really thoughtful move, especially for something handling sensitive tax data.
@ecommercepro Thank you. It was the first decision I made and the one I would defend hardest. The scope is drive.file, so the app only ever sees files it created and never the rest of your Drive. The side effect I like most is that leaving costs you nothing. Stop using CleanTab tomorrow and every receipt and spreadsheet is still sitting in your Drive exactly where it was.