Prashant — building the tools I wished existed.

I’m Prashant.

I grew up in Agra, studied engineering, and spent most of my twenties writing code — first as a salaried developer, then as a freelance contractor working with small Indian businesses and a handful of overseas clients. Engineering taught me to read primary sources before trusting a Stack Overflow answer. That habit stayed.

What engineering did not teach me was how to file a clean ITR with foreign income, advance tax, and short-term capital gains all on the same return. I learned that the hard way. The first year I freelanced, I missed an advance-tax instalment, got a 234C notice, and spent two weekends reverse-engineering what the Income Tax portal actually wanted. The second year I tried a popular paid filing platform and watched it auto-fill three numbers wrong because its UI hid the regime toggle behind a paywall.

By year three I had built my own little spreadsheet to compute slabs, surcharge, cess and 87A rebate myself. By year five, that spreadsheet had grown into a folder of tools. By year seven, friends were asking for copies. BillCraft is what happens when you turn that folder into a website.

I also bootstrapped a small services business between 2020 and 2024. I registered for GST, raised invoices, chased payments, deducted TDS on vendor payments, deposited it, filed quarterly returns, and filed my own GSTR-3B and ITR every cycle. That is the experience layer behind every calculator and every guide on this site — not a writer hired on Fiverr, not an AI summarising someone else’s blog. Someone who actually filed it.

What I write about.

Everything on this site is in a domain I’ve personally lived with as a taxpayer, freelancer, investor, or small-business operator. No general personal-finance fluff — just the slices of Indian tax and money that actually trip people up.

If a topic is outside this list — insurance product selection, derivatives strategies, crypto trading tax edge cases — I’ll either skip it or bring in a contributor with first-hand experience and disclose their credentials at the top of the article.

My credentials, explicitly.

I am not a Chartered Accountant. What I have instead is a long, boring, paper-trail of personally doing the thing I write about. Here is the receipt:

How I research.

Every article and every calculator on BillCraft is cross-referenced with primary sources before publish. The hierarchy I follow is strict:

1. Bare Act first. Income Tax Act 1961, CGST Act 2017, and the relevant Finance Act — read directly from the statute as amended. Section number cited inline whenever a specific rule is invoked.
2. CBDT / CBIC circulars and notifications second. When a rule needs interpretation, I quote the circular number and date (e.g., CBDT Circular No. 21/2015 on 87A rebate).
3. Official portal verification. Every calculator’s output is tested against the actual incometax.gov.in or cbic.gov.in portal for a few representative inputs. If our number doesn’t match theirs, our number is wrong — full stop.
4. ICAI / ICSI / RBI / SEBI publications for cross-checks where applicable.
5. Other blogs and YouTube videos: never as a source. Useful for spotting a topic gap, never as the evidence for a number.

Numbers like “TDS threshold under 194I” or “LTCG exemption limit” get hard-coded to the section of the Finance Act they came from. When the Finance Act changes, the page changes — and we add a “Updated” stamp with the date and a one-line changelog of what moved.

My editorial policy.

Three rules I refuse to break:

• Facts are checked, not assumed. Every numeric claim, every threshold, every section reference is verifiable against a primary source — and the source is cited or linked on the page.
• No paid placements. No sponsored content. BillCraft has zero affiliate deals as of today. The only revenue is Google AdSense (disclosed in the cookie banner). I do not take money to recommend a broker, bank, or product.
• Disclaimers are honest, not theatre. When a calculator approximates (e.g., PPF interest using simple year-end compounding instead of monthly-minimum-balance), the approximation is noted on the page itself, not buried in a footer.

The full editorial standards — sourcing hierarchy, correction policy, AI-use disclosure, update cadence — live on a dedicated page: Editorial Standards.

How to reach me.

Found a bug in a calculator? Spotted an out-of-date threshold after the Finance Act? Want to contribute as a CA reviewer? Drop me a line. Real human, real reply — usually within 48 hours.

Press & podcast inquiries welcome. I’m available to talk about Indian small-business compliance, freelancer taxation, and bootstrapped fintech.