Set up and operate a clean books system for your studio. Choose between Zoho Books, QuickBooks, or alternatives. Configure for Indian GST. Establish invoicing workflow (quote → invoice → payment → reconciliation). Build a chart of accounts that makes year-end tax filing painless. Establish monthly close discipline.
Bookkeeping is structured logging with mandatory schema. Every transaction is a structured log entry with required fields (date, amount, account, GST treatment, counterparty). Year-end reconciliation is SELECT sum(amount) GROUP BY account, period. Same discipline as wiring structured logging into a production app — if your logs are bad, every downstream operation suffers; if they're good, every downstream operation is a query away.
The chart of accounts is your schema. Get it right early; migrating later is painful. Think about what queries you'll want to run at year-end ("show me USD revenue by client," "show me marketing spend by product") and design the schema to make those queries trivial.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
I am going to be unusually direct in this file because the failure mode of this module is unusually predictable. Most engineers set up Zoho Books in week one of their OPC, configu…
Bookkeeping is the substrate everything else sits on. Bad books make GST returns wrong, IT returns ambiguous, FEMA reconciliation impossible, audit hell guaranteed, and your CA's …
Approach: Important
Approach: Reference
1. Set up Zoho Books (or alternative) for your OPC. Configure GSTIN, GST settings, chart of accounts (revenue split by source, expenses split by category). 2. Import or recreate t…
5 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.