Clinic accounts for your CA: the monthly pack What to send every month, how to reconcile UPI, and the dates that apply to a small clinic.

Send your CA one folder every month, by the seventh, with the month's collections split by cash, UPI and card, the bank statement, the UPI and card settlement reports, every expense bill, the salary sheet with transfer proof, any TDS or GST working, invoices for anything the clinic bought to keep, and a short note of what did not match. The CA ties collections to the bank, checks the two cash limits, and tells you whether advance tax is due. Done monthly, the return is a summary of twelve closed months.

Why send the CA anything every month?

Three reasons. Errors are cheap to fix in the month they happen and expensive in July: a UPI credit nobody can place is a two-minute question in week one and an unexplained receipt at year end. Advance tax is a running estimate; a doctor keeping books pays instalments in June, September, December and March (section 408(1)), and the CA cannot estimate the year without the months. And the presumptive scheme for doctors turns on the gross receipts figure and the cash share of it, both of which are easiest to build month by month; our post on income tax for doctors under the 2025 Act explains the 50% scheme and its limits.

What goes in the monthly pack

Item 1 is the base for everything else, and it has to come from the visit list, not from the UPI app. The app's total includes every credit to that number, whoever sent it. The daily routine that produces a clean item 1 is in our post on closing the day at the front desk, and which numbers the owner should read along the way are in daily reports a clinic owner should check.

How to reconcile UPI settlement reports with the bank

If patients pay to a UPI ID linked straight to the clinic's current account, each payment appears in the bank statement as its own credit, and reconciliation is a line-by-line tick against the visit list. If the clinic uses a payment provider's QR or a card machine, money arrives in batches: many patient payments are settled as one credit, net of the provider's fees, on a later day. The bank statement then shows fewer, larger credits that match nothing on the visit list until you open the settlement report.

1. Download the provider's settlement report for the month as CSV. It lists each transaction with its date, amount, fee and the settlement batch or UTR it was paid out in.
2. Match each transaction in the report to a visit marked UPI or card, by amount and time. Mark the visits that have no transaction and the transactions that have no visit.
3. Group the report by settlement batch. Each batch's net amount should equal one credit in the bank statement, on or after the transaction dates.
4. Total the fees deducted in the month. That is an expense; give the CA the figure, and the provider's invoice for it if one is issued.
5. Carry forward transactions from the last days of the month that settle in the next month. They are this month's receipts and next month's bank credits; list them so neither month looks wrong.
6. Put every mismatch in the exceptions note with a reason or the word 'unknown'. Do not adjust a visit to make the totals agree.

The two cash limits to test every month

The Income-tax Act, 2025 took over from the 1961 Act on 1 April 2026, and the old sections 269ST and 40A(3) now sit at sections 186 and 36(4).

Receiving cash, section 186(1): "No person shall receive an amount of ₹200000 or more–– (a) in aggregate from a person in a day; or (b) in respect of a single transaction; or (c) in respect of transactions relating to one event or occasion from a person, except through— (i) an account payee cheque; or (ii) account payee bank draft; or (iii) electronic clearing system through a bank account; or (iv) any other electronic mode, as may be prescribed." For a clinic the risk is a procedure package or a long course of treatment paid in cash in parts; the limit is per event, so splitting does not help.

Paying cash, section 36(4): "Where in respect of any expenditure incurred by the assessee, any payment or aggregate of payments made in a day to a person exceeds ₹10000 and is not made through specified banking or online mode, then the expenditure by way of such payments shall not be allowed as a deduction." Rent, salaries and supplier bills paid in cash above that line lose their deduction. For a doctor on the presumptive scheme, who claims no expenses, the second rule has less bite; the first applies to everyone.

The salary sheet and what it should show

One line per employee: name, designation, monthly wage, days worked, overtime hours and amount, deductions with the reason, net paid, date paid and the bank reference. The Code on Wages, 2019 requires monthly wages to be paid "before the expiry of the seventh day of the succeeding month" (section 17(1)(iv)) and allows no deductions except those it authorises (section 18(1)). If the clinic is covered by provident fund, the EPF Scheme, 2026 requires the employer to "remit the contributions to the Fund" within fifteen days of the close of every month. Whether your clinic is covered, and what minimum wage applies in your state, are in our posts on PF and ESI for small clinics and minimum wages for clinic staff.

GST: only if the clinic is registered

A consultation-only clinic usually is not. Section 23(1)(a) of the CGST Act, 2017 says "any person engaged exclusively in the business of supplying goods or services or both that are not liable to tax or wholly exempt from tax" is not liable to register, and health care services by a clinical establishment or an authorised medical practitioner are exempt; our post on GST on doctor consultation fees has the notification. A clinic that also sells taxable goods or services counts its aggregate turnover against section 22(1): registration is required where it "exceeds twenty lakh rupees" in a financial year (ten lakh in the special category States). If the clinic is registered, add the month's tax invoices and the return working to the pack, and keep the records for the period section 36 of the CGST Act sets: "until the expiry of seventy-two months from the due date of furnishing of annual return for the year pertaining to such accounts and records".

How long should the clinic keep its books?

Section 62(3) of the Income-tax Act, 2025 leaves it to the Board to prescribe the books, their particulars, where they are kept and "the period for which such books of account and other documents are to be retained". The period is in the Income-tax Rules, 2026, which we could not read on the Income Tax Department's site this month, so we do not state it; ask your CA. The penalty for getting it wrong is in the Act itself: section 441 allows a penalty of ₹25,000 if a person fails to keep and maintain the books as per section 62 or the rules, or to "retain such books of account and other documents for the period specified in the said rules". Section 2(19) of the Act counts day-books and cash books kept in electronic form or on cloud storage as books of account, so a clean digital folder per month is a valid way to keep them.

Patient records follow different rules from account books; see our post on how long to keep medical records.

The 12-month calendar for a small clinic

Only dates we found in the Act or a Gazette notification are listed. GST and TDS deposit dates are set by rules your CA works to; add them to this list if they apply to your clinic.

A first-week routine that keeps the pack small

1. Day 1: export the month's collections by payment mode and refunds from the clinic software or total the daily sheets.
2. Day 1: download the bank statement and the UPI and card settlement reports for the month.
3. Day 2: reconcile settlements to the bank and to the visits, as above. Write the exceptions note.
4. Day 2: run the two cash checks and the cash share.
5. Day 3: collect bills, scan any paper, and name files by date and vendor.
6. Before the 7th: pay salaries by bank transfer and add the salary sheet with references.
7. Before the 7th: share the folder with the CA, with questions written at the top. In March, June, September and December, ask for the advance tax estimate.

Where Vitels fits

Item 1 of the pack is the part Vitels produces. The desk records each payment as cash, UPI or card at billing, reports show collections by payment mode, and the clinic admin can export the full data as CSV at any time to hand to the CA. Vitels does not connect to the bank or the payment provider, and it does not do payroll, GST returns or tax; the settlement matching above is still done by a person.