8 posts tagged with "India"

Every July the same scramble begins. The CA asks for your capital gains statement. You log into the broker, download a PDF, realise it spans the wrong dates, download another. You dig out bank interest certificates. You try to remember which mutual funds you redeemed and whether they were held long enough to be long-term. Then you do it all again for your spouse and your parents.

It doesn't have to be a once-a-year archaeology dig. The information exists all year — it's just scattered. Sahidha's job is to keep it consolidated and ITR-ready as you go.

Every year the same question returns: old regime or new? There's no universal answer — it depends on how much you claim in deductions. Here's how to think about it without a spreadsheet meltdown.

Here's a quick test for any money app. Move ₹50,000 from your HDFC savings account to your ICICI account. Then look at your monthly summary. If it shows ₹50,000 of expenses and ₹50,000 of income that month, the app is lying to you — and it's a more common bug than you'd think.

Indian income tax doesn't treat all income the same. It sorts everything you earn into five heads, and each head has its own rules. Understanding the heads is the difference between a return that fills itself and an evening of guesswork.

Sell a mutual fund, some shares, gold, or a property, and the profit is a capital gain — and most capital gains are taxable. The rules differ by what you sold and how long you held it. Here's the mental model, minus the jargon.

Most Indian families don't have a bookkeeping problem because they're careless. They have one because the tools assume a household is one person with one bank account. Real households are nothing like that — and so the money ends up in a sprawl of Excel sheets, bank PDFs, and "beta, did you pay the maid?" WhatsApp messages.

We're building Sahidha to fix that: proper, boring, trustworthy bookkeeping for an entire household.

The income tax department already knows a surprising amount about your year — your interest, dividends, big transactions, salary TDS, and more. It hands you that view in two documents: Form 26AS and the AIS. If your return doesn't line up with them, you may get a query. The fix is simple: reconcile before you file.

Filing season always feels worse than it is — not because the form is hard, but because the data is scattered across six banks, three brokers, two insurers and a shoebox of receipts. Get the data in order first, and the return almost fills itself.

Here's the checklist we use, in the order that actually works.