A Tax Consultant's Online Journey: Rs 60,000 Monthly from ITR Filing

Short answer: ITR filing pays well in peak season and very little outside it. My best month was around Rs 60,000 and my worst was Rs 4,200. You don't need to be a CA for simple salaried returns, the government portal costs nothing to start on, and clients come from referrals rather than advertising.

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One night in July I was still working at 2am, having filed eleven returns that day.

That month came to a little over Rs 60,000. And I genuinely remember thinking that this was it, the thing had worked, this is what the job looks like now.

December brought in Rs 4,200.

For the entire month. And that was when I understood that I hadn't been looking at a business. I'd been looking at one month.

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How it started

A friend asked me to file his return. I did it for free, because he was a friend.

He then sent someone from his office. That person paid me Rs 300 without being asked. Then he brought two more people.

My first 20 clients arrived exactly like that, entirely over WhatsApp. No website, no ads, no business card. Just one chain of introductions.

That matters more in this work than in most. Nobody hands their salary slips, bank statements and PAN details to a stranger they found through an ad. Trust comes first and competence is assumed afterwards, which is slightly backwards but that's how it works.

By my third season, roughly 70% of my clients came from other clients. I still don't run ads.

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The pricing mistake

I started at Rs 400 per return.

The reasoning was that I was new, so I'd be cheap, so people would come. They did come.

What I hadn't understood is that a Rs 400 client has exactly the same expectations as a Rs 2,000 client. They call. They send fifteen WhatsApp messages. They ask you about a notice eight months later. And they expect Rs 400 again next year.

I actually worked it out for one case. Chasing documents, two rounds of clarification, and the filing itself came to about two hours forty minutes. For Rs 400.

In season two I moved to Rs 850, fully expecting to lose half my clients.

I lost three. Out of roughly sixty.

And the three who left were the ones who had generated the most messages. To be fair, that was an upgrade rather than a loss.

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The seasonality nobody puts in the thumbnail

This is the single most important thing about the work and it's missing from every video promising income from tax filing.

My year runs roughly like this. Late June through the end of July is chaos. August has some late filers. September to March is close to empty apart from notices, corrections, and a few business clients.

Average that across twelve months and the number bears very little resemblance to that one July.

In year one I made the obvious error. I saw July, felt wealthy, and raised my monthly spending accordingly. By December I was cutting all of it back again, which was a mildly humiliating few weeks.

Now I mentally divide the peak across the whole year. The number is smaller and it's honest.

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What I do in the off-season

This is the fix I found in year two, and it's why December is no longer a Rs 4,200 month.

GST work, which runs monthly and quarterly all year. It's repetitive and unglamorous, but it's predictable, and predictable is exactly what this business lacks. Tally and GST freelancing is the natural neighbour to this.

TDS returns, which are quarterly.

And notices, which mostly arrive between October and February. These pay better per hour, partly because the client is anxious and values a fast, calm answer.

The year still peaks in July. It just doesn't fall off a cliff afterwards.

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The line I don't cross

People ask whether this is allowed without a CA qualification. For ordinary salaried returns, yes. The portal is open to anyone, the taxpayer can file it themselves, and you're helping them through a process.

But there's a boundary. Audit cases, company returns, anything with a complicated business structure. I don't touch those.

I've referred six or seven such cases to a CA I know.

What I didn't expect is that he sends work back. Simple salaried returns that aren't worth his time land with me instead. Two people with different economics, feeding each other, and it's turned out to be one of the more valuable relationships in the whole thing.

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The hardest part isn't the tax

The technical work is genuinely the easy bit. I'll say that plainly.

The hard part is getting documents out of people. Someone sends a photograph of a Form 16, taken at an angle, half the page cut off, numbers illegible. You ask again. It arrives four days later missing something else.

In peak season that alone can eat a full day.

In season two I made one small change. A WhatsApp template listing exactly what I need, ending with a line saying: send a PDF rather than a photo, and if you're photographing a screen, the whole page needs to be in the frame.

That roughly halved the time I spend chasing documents. One message template. There was nothing clever about it at all.

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The mistake that cost me

I once missed a small interest income on a client's return. Savings account interest, a minor amount.

A notice arrived. He called, understandably rattled.

I sorted it, filed a revised return, and the whole episode took about three hours of my time. I didn't charge him anything, because the error was mine.

Since then I check the annual information statement and the tax credit statement on every single case, no matter how confidently a client tells me there's nothing else. Clients often genuinely don't know what has been reported against their PAN.

One mistake rewrote my entire process. And honestly, if it hadn't happened in year one on a small case, it would have happened later on a much bigger one.

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What I'd do differently

Start at Rs 800. Being cheap never once brought me a client I wanted.

And build the off-season work in year one rather than spending that first December discovering the problem the hard way.

Freelancers turned out to be a good entry point too, since their returns are more involved than a salaried person's and most of them are quite lost about it. A fair number of my regulars came from exactly that confusion, and it is a similar route to the one in this accountant's move from Tally to QuickBooks work.

So if you're considering this: don't look at the July number. Look at the December one.