A CA Inter Student's Bookkeeping Freelancing: Rs 19,000 Monthly

My first month's earnings: Rs 2,350. For that, I put in 41 hours.

Do the division and it comes to Rs 57 an hour. I sat there with my CA Inter notes open, honestly unsure whether to feel proud or embarrassed.

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How it started

My father has a friend who runs a clothing shop. His books lived in an old version of Tally, and a nephew looked at them now and then when he had time. One evening my father said, almost in passing, "This boy is doing CA, give it to him."

I thought the work was beneath me. After all those ledgers and adjustments in my coursework, I was going to just enter bills? To be fair, that was ego talking.

By the end of my first sitting, I had changed my mind. Real books are nothing like textbook problems. Some bills had no GST number. Some cash payments were slips of paper that said only "goods." The bank statement had three entries nobody could remember. That is where the 41 hours went.

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What the work actually is

Most small clients want three things: monthly entries, bank reconciliation, and data prepared for their GST filing.

Entries mean typing sales and purchase bills into Tally. Reconciliation means matching the bank statement against the books and chasing whatever doesn't match. The GST part is about making sure input and output figures are tidy. (Filing the return itself is done by the client's own CA or a GST practitioner. I made that clear at the start.)

Most of the job, if I am being plain about it, is detective work. One client's books were off by Rs 4,860 and I could not find the gap for two full days. In the end a supplier payment had been entered twice.

Two days for one duplicate.

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Where the clients came from

The first three came through people I knew: my father's friend, a tuition teacher, and a cousin with a small online shop.

I tried Fiverr for 3 weeks and got nothing. On Upwork I sent 14 proposals and heard back from one, at a budget too low to bother with. Actually, that's unfair to say about the platforms in general. It didn't work for me, but it may well work for someone with a stronger profile.

One LinkedIn post saying I do bookkeeping for small businesses brought in a single client. But that client pays Rs 6,200 a month and is still with me.

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The money, and the month it went wrong

The monthly figures from my first three clients were Rs 3,000, Rs 4,500, and Rs 6,200. Two more joined later, and by month 7 the total was around Rs 19,000. That wasn't steady, though. One month brought only Rs 14,300 because a client stopped work after his busy season.

And one client held back payment for three weeks. We had no written terms, only a verbal understanding. Since then I put scope and payment date in writing on WhatsApp for every client.

The worst stretch came six weeks before my exam. I told two clients to expect delays. One was fine with it. The other gave the work to someone else the next month. It stung, but the mistake was mine, because I should have warned them earlier.

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What I got wrong about pricing

I priced by the hour in my head, which turned out to be a mistake. A client with 60 monthly transactions and a client with 340 are very different jobs, yet my first two quotes were nearly the same. The second client's work took me almost five times as long, and I ended up doing it for Rs 4,500 because I had already said the number out loud.

Now I ask for a sample month of bills before naming a price. Ten minutes of looking at a messy folder tells you more than any conversation. Clients who send a neat folder get a lower quote, and clients who send a photo of a crumpled bill taken in a car get a higher one. Nobody has complained about that yet, which surprised me. I had braced for at least one awkward phone call, and instead one client simply apologised for the car photo and sent a proper scan the next morning.

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Making it fit with studying

My rules are simple now. During exam season, no more than three clients. Work happens between 6 and 8 in the morning when my head is clear, never late at night.

I once tried reconciliation at 1 a.m. By morning I found an entry posted upside down and had to redo the whole thing. Net result: no time saved, and a worse mood.

Something I didn't expect was how much the clients helped my studies. Accruals and prepaid expenses, which were pure theory in my books, became real once I saw them in actual bills. Vouching for the audit paper made sense because I was looking at vouchers every single day.

If you want to start, learning Tally is the most direct way in. And if you want to see where this can go later, one accountant's Upwork journey shows a different style of work.

I still can't say whether I will keep all these clients once articleship begins. Time will shrink, and five at once might be too many. Maybe I will keep two, or maybe...