Rakhat

Inspiration

Every March, my father closes his hardware shop early to sit with his CA, hand over months of receipts scattered across WhatsApp forwards and paper slips, and pay ₹8,000 for someone to file returns he doesn't understand. He's not alone crores of Indian kirana and retail owners do the same thing, not because the law requires a CA for businesses their size, but because no tool has ever made GST compliance simple enough to handle yourself.

Vyapar gives you the data. ClearTax files the return. Nobody connects the two and explains what it means in plain language to a hardware shop owner in tier-2 India. That gap is Rakhat.

What it does

Rakhat is a one-stop billing and compliance platform for Indian SMB retailers. Generate a fully GST-compliant invoice in under 10 seconds CGST/SGST/IGST splits, HSN codes, PDF download, all handled automatically. Inventory updates in real time with every sale. Multiple team members with role-based access so a family-run shop can have the owner, accountant, and helper all on one account.

The differentiator is the GST intelligence layer. It flags ITC mismatches before a tax notice arrives, recommends switching to the composition scheme if it saves money, and reads supplier invoice photos via OCR so purchases log themselves without manual entry.

How we built it

Next.js 16 on Vercel, Express 5 + TypeScript on Render, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2 as the primary database. Aurora's scale-to-zero fits the load pattern of small Indian retailers exactly. Prisma 7 as ORM, Upstash Redis for OTP, Cloudflare R2 for invoice PDFs, gpt-4o for OCR, gpt-4o-mini for plain language advisory.

The harder problem wasn't the stack it was understanding Indian GST law well enough to build correctly. Intra-state splits into CGST + SGST. Inter-state becomes IGST. HSN codes map each product to a GST rate. The invoice footer groups tax by HSN the way a CA expects. Every invoice determines this automatically from seller and buyer state codes.

Challenges we ran into

GST logic was the hardest problem. Determining intra vs inter-state automatically across 37 state codes, composition dealers, and unregistered buyers took longer than any single piece of code.

UX was the second challenge. The people using this have never used billing software before. Every screen required a decision: how much to expose, how much to handle silently. Getting the balance right enough control for an accountant, simple enough for a shop owner on his phone required real iteration with real users.

Schema design was the deepest challenge. Multi-business multi-user RBAC, snapshot fields preserving product data at time of sale, forward-only atomic invoice sequences that never reuse a number — designing a schema that survives future versions without painful migrations took the most time in the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a genuinely compliant GST billing tool, not a cosmetically correct one. The invoice generation works the way a CA expects. The schema handles the full business lifecycle. The GST intelligence layer explains compliance in plain language instead of dumping numbers on screen.

Most importantly , real shop owners are using it. That validation matters more than anything else.

What we learned

Building Rakhat meant learning how Indian businesses actually operate how money moves, how compliance works, what a CA actually does for a small retailer. You cannot build this from documentation alone. You have to understand the problem from first principles.

The biggest technical learning was database design under real constraints Aurora Serverless v2, Prisma migrations, connection pooling, serverless infrastructure. Every schema trade-off has a downstream consequence.

What's next for Rakhat

GSP integration : Real-time GSTR-2B reconciliation via a GST Suvidha Provider API. Automatic matching of sales data against what suppliers filed on the government portal.

CA connect layer : In-app access to a Chartered Accountant on demand. Rakhat organises the data, the CA reviews and advises.

WhatsApp integration : Filing deadline reminders, liability alerts, and invoice sharing directly over WhatsApp so owners stay informed without opening the app.

Built With

• fullstack