AIS Reconciliation — Match What the Department Already Knows

What AIS Is

The Annual Information Statement is the Income-Tax Department's consolidated file on you for a financial year. You didn't report any of it — other people did:

• Customers who deducted TDS on payments to you, and filed their TDS returns
• Banks reporting interest credited to your accounts
• SFT reporting — large deposits, property deals, investments
• The GST system, reporting the turnover you declared in your returns

It's the successor to Form 26AS and it's considerably wider. When you file your ITR, the department already holds this file — and their systems compare your return against it automatically.

Why It Must Reconcile

Two failure modes, and they cost in opposite directions:

Both are ordinary bookkeeping gaps rather than anything sinister — a customer who deducted TDS on a bill you never raised, a bank interest credit nobody booked. AIS reconciliation finds them while you can still fix them cheaply.

No OTP or API Access Needed Here

Worth saying up front, because it differs from GSTR-2B reconciliation: AIS reconciliation is entirely offline and free. You download the file yourself from the e-filing portal and load it. There's no API access to enable, no OTP, no session to keep alive, and nothing metered against your wallet.

Step 1 — Download the AIS JSON

1. Log in to the Income-Tax e-filing portal at incometax.gov.in with your PAN and password.
2. Open AIS (under Services, or from the dashboard tile), and proceed to the AIS portal.
3. Select the financial year you're reconciling.
4. Open the Annual Information Statement and choose Download → JSON.

Take the JSON rather than the PDF — the PDF is for reading, the JSON is what software can parse. If the download arrives as a password-protected ZIP, the password is normally your PAN in lower case followed by your date of birth as DDMMYYYY; extract the JSON before loading it.

Step 2 — Open AIS Reconciliation

1. Open the 🤖 Auto Accounting menu.
2. Click 🧾 AIS Reconciliation (Income Tax).

The screen opens with a single 📂 Load AIS JSON… button and five summary tiles: Issues, Warnings, Lines Matched, Lines Unmatched, and TDS in AIS (₹).

Step 3 — Load the File

Click 📂 Load AIS JSON… and pick the downloaded file.

Once loaded, the label beside the button shows the file name, the financial year and the PAN read out of the file itself. Check those before reading anything else — loading last year's AIS, or a different family member's, is an easy mistake that produces a confusing report.

The parser is deliberately tolerant. It reads the portal's own nested AIS export, and also a simple normalised shape if you or your CA have pre-processed the data into a list of lines with category, party, PAN/TAN, amount and TDS.

Make sure the right company and financial year are open in iAccounting — the comparison runs against that company's books for that period.

Step 4 — Read the Aggregate Checks

Before the line detail, iAccounting runs four or five headline checks, each badged ISSUE, WARNING, INFO or PASS, with the rupee amount at stake and a suggested fix.

AIS Lines Not Found in Books

The serious one — flagged as an ISSUE whenever anything appears. These are information lines with no matching party in your books at all. The card names the biggest offenders and totals what's at stake. As the app puts it: the department already knows about these, and unbooked income triggers a notice.

AIS Amounts Higher Than Books

Parties you have booked, but for less than the AIS says they paid you. Each is listed with both figures side by side. The difference is either a timing question — booked in a different financial year — or genuinely unbooked income.

AIS Total vs Books Income

The headline comparison: everything AIS says was paid or credited to you, against the total income recorded in your books. This passes when books income is greater than or equal to the AIS total, which is the correct relationship — AIS only sees transactions somebody reported, so your books should always show at least that much and usually more. Books lower than AIS means you're reporting less than the department can already see.

TDS in AIS vs TDS Recorded in Books

Compares the TDS deducted on your income per AIS against the TDS receivable sitting in your books. A shortfall here is money you're about to leave on the table — the fix is on each receipt where tax was deducted, debit TDS Receivable (Current Assets) for the TDS portion.

GST Turnover in AIS vs Sales in Books

Appears only when your AIS carries a GST turnover line. See below.

Step 5 — Work Each Information Line

Below the checks, every AIS line is listed with the party, amount, TDS, category and PAN/TAN. Unmatched lines are sorted to the top, largest first — so the biggest problems are the first thing you see.

❌ NOT FOUND

Two distinct causes, and the note tells you which:

• "No ledger matches this party" — nothing in your books resembles that name. Either the income genuinely isn't booked, or the party exists under a different name. Company names in AIS come from the deductor's TDS return, so they're often the full legal name where your ledger uses a short one.
• "Ledger exists but has no transactions this year" — you know the party, but nothing was recorded for them this financial year.

Fix by booking the missing income, or by renaming the ledger to match so future reconciliations match automatically.

⚠ PARTIAL

The party matches and has transactions, but your books show less than AIS. The note gives both figures and the gap. Check whether the balance was invoiced in the previous or next financial year — a March invoice paid in April is the classic case — before assuming anything is missing.

✅ MATCHED

Your books cover the AIS amount for that party. Nothing to do.

The TDS Ledger Naming Trap

This one is worth knowing, because it produces a confusing result if you fall into it.

To total your recorded TDS credit, iAccounting looks for asset-nature ledgers whose name contains "TDS". That's a convention, not a fixed field — so if your TDS receivable ledger is called something else ("Tax Deducted by Customers", "Advance Tax & TDS" filed under a liability group, and so on), the check will report your TDS as unrecorded even though you booked it properly.

The fix is simple: name it with TDS in it — TDS Receivable is the conventional choice — and file it under Current Assets. Do that once and this check works correctly every year afterwards.

GST Turnover vs Sales

AIS lines that look like GST turnover are handled separately — they aren't third-party receipts, so counting them alongside customer payments would double your income. Instead they're totalled and compared directly against your Sales Accounts, passing when the two agree within about 1%.

Take a difference here seriously. The department cross-checks GST turnover against ITR turnover, and a gap between the two is one of the most commonly picked-up mismatches. Reconcile your GSTR-3B turnover with your Sales ledger before filing the ITR.

Ask the AI Instead

The same reconciliation is available to the AI assistant. Press F12 and ask it to reconcile an AIS file, and it will run the identical checks and summarise the findings in conversation — useful when you want the takeaway rather than the full screen.

Tips & Best Practice

1. Reconcile before filing, not after. Before filing it's a correction; after filing it's a revised return, or a reply to a notice.
2. Download the AIS late. It keeps updating as deductors file and correct their TDS returns. An AIS pulled in April is incomplete; one pulled shortly before you file is far more reliable.
3. Fix party names once. Renaming a ledger to match the AIS name pays off every year — the same customers report you every year.
4. Name your TDS ledger properly — see above.
5. Confirm the FY and PAN in the file label every single time.
6. Don't ignore small lines. Bank interest is small and almost always unbooked — and it's one of the most frequent mismatches of all.
7. Books above AIS is normal. Cash sales and customers who don't deduct TDS never appear in AIS. Books income should exceed the AIS total; the reverse is the warning sign.
8. Keep the JSON with that year's records. If a query arrives two years later, you'll want the file as it stood when you filed.

What's Next?

• Year-End Final Entries — close the books before reconciling AIS
• GSTR-2B Reconciliation — the same discipline for input credit
• Income Tax Guides — ITR filing, TDS and advance tax