CA Certificate for Proprietorship Firm

Most proprietors run one bank account for two purposes and only notice when someone asks them to separate the two on paper. Stock sits unvalued, receivables are tracked in a diary, and the books were never built to be read by an outsider. The problem is not that the money is untraceable. It is that nothing in the records was designed to prove anything to a third party.

So the work becomes finding what stands in for a formal ledger. Filed returns establish the income position, bank statements establish the flows, and purchase invoices with a physical count establish stock. From those, a chartered accountant assembles a statement that will hold up to questioning. The personal and business sides are presented separately, so a lender can read either one without having to untangle it from the other.

Everything below is source material rather than a summary, because each figure in the statement is traced back to the record that governs it. The first list is needed on every engagement; the second applies where you hold those assets.

• PAN of the proprietor, which is also the business's PAN
• Income tax returns with the computation of income for the last three years
• Bank statements for the business account and for any personal account business runs through
• Books of account, or a backup of the accounting software file
• Stock statement as at the certificate date, with the basis it was valued on
• Debtors listing with ageing, and the creditors listing, as at the same date
• Title documents for business premises, and purchase invoices for plant and equipment
• Loan, overdraft and cash credit statements, with the sanction letters

Where they apply:

• GST returns filed for the year, where the business is registered

• The fee covers one certificate speaking to one date. A later date is a fresh engagement on updated records, not a re-dating of the first.
• Goods and services tax and any government charge are additional, as the footnote on the table states.
• Where records have to be reconstructed before certification can begin, that work is quoted separately and agreed before it starts.
• City pages carry the same fee as the national service. Certification does not cost more in one city than in another.
• An On quote row means the scope decides the fee. It is not a higher tier waiting to be sold; some engagements simply cannot be priced before the records are seen.

All fees listed are indicative only and do not constitute a binding offer. The final amount depends on the scope of records to be examined.

Get a free consultation — Call +91 94594 56700 or WhatsApp us.

Enter business and household holdings in separate columns. The calculator totals them into the single position the law requires for a proprietor while keeping the two sides readable, which is what a lender wants to see and what a combined figure hides.

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Go deeper:

In law a proprietorship and its proprietor are one person. There is no separate entity to certify, no separate PAN and no separate return, which is why a single computation covers the business and the household together and says so on its face.

What governs the engagement is therefore the record-keeping the proprietor was required to maintain, and the returns already filed. The certificate has to sit consistently with both, because a reader who obtains either will compare them.

• Section 44AA, Income-tax Act 1961 read with Rule 6F, Income-tax Rules 1962prescribes which books a proprietor must maintain and, for specified professions, exactly which registers. Where they exist the certificate is drawn from them rather than from a reconstruction.
• Section 139, Income-tax Act 1961requires the proprietor to file one return covering business and personal income together, which is the document the certified position is reconciled to.
• Section 44AB, Income-tax Act 1961brings a tax audit into play above the prescribed threshold, which changes which set of accounts the figure may properly be taken from.
• Section 39, Central Goods and Services Tax Act 2017requires periodic returns where the business is registered, and the turnover declared there is a reasonableness check on the trading result the books produce.
• ICAI Guidance Note on Reports or Certificates for Special Purposes (Revised 2016)governs a certificate of this kind, including the limitation that has to be stated where records could not support a figure and none was estimated in its place.
• ICAI Council direction on UDIN, mandatory from 1 February 2019requires the UDIN on the signed certificate, which matters more here than anywhere because much of what is certified rests on records nobody outside the business has seen.

Official sources: ICAI · ICAI UDIN Portal · Ministry of Corporate Affairs · Income Tax Department

The clock on a proprietor's certificate is the lender's, not the law's. What decides how long the work takes is the state of the records: mixed banking and uncounted stock add days that a maintained set never would. Say so at the outset and it can be planned around. Call or WhatsApp +91 94594 56700 to describe what you have.

For a proprietor almost all of the work is separation: deciding which money belonged to the business and which to the household, when one account has carried both for years. That is a conversation rather than a form. Say so at the outset if your records are mixed, because it changes the shape of the engagement rather than merely its length. Send the account statements and whatever books exist, and we will tell you what has to be rebuilt before anything can be certified.