MIS reporting services for better business decisions.
A monthly pack that tells you what the business earned, what it owes, what it is owed and where the cash went - prepared by a CA, delivered by the 10th, and reconciled to your books, your bank and your GST returns.
Most MIS packs fail on that last point. They are built in a spreadsheet alongside the books rather than out of them, and by month three the revenue in the MIS and the revenue in the GSTR-1 are two different numbers. This page explains what a proper monthly pack contains, what decision each report should drive, and how to make yours tie out.
Four offices - Kolkata, Delhi, Gurugram, Pune · In-house CA and CS team · Work delivered remotely across India
Reviewed by CA & CS Team · Regikart · Last updated 7 September 2026
What an MIS report actually is
MIS stands for management information system. In Indian practice the term has narrowed to mean one specific thing: the set of financial and operating reports the management of a business reads every month to decide what to do next.
That is the whole definition. An MIS report is a report prepared for the people running the business, on a cycle short enough that they can still act on it. Nothing about it is prescribed by law. Nobody files it. No auditor signs it. Which is exactly why the quality varies so wildly from one business to the next.
How MIS differs from financial statements
These two get confused constantly, and the confusion causes real problems - usually a business that produces beautiful annual financial statements and has no idea how the last quarter went.
| MIS reports | Financial statements | |
|---|---|---|
| Frequency | Monthly, sometimes weekly | Annual |
| Audience | Management - owner, CFO, board, bank, investors | Statutory - registrar, income tax, shareholders, auditor |
| Format | Whatever the reader needs. No prescribed format | Schedule III of the Companies Act, 2013, for companies |
| Purpose | To decide something this month | To report what happened last year |
| Detail | Segment, branch or product-wise, as deep as the decision requires | Consolidated, in the prescribed heads |
| Audited | No | Yes, where audit applies |
| Deadline driver | Your own management cycle | Filing dates and the audit calendar |
Financial statements look backwards and satisfy a legal obligation. MIS looks at the month just closed and tells you what to change. You need both, and they should be built from the same ledgers - if your MIS and your year-end accounts come from different places, one of them is wrong. We cover the statutory side separately at financial statement preparation.
What belongs in a monthly MIS pack
There is no standard list, so here is ours - and more importantly, the decision each report is supposed to drive. A report that does not change a decision should be dropped from the pack.
Profit and loss, month and year to date
Revenue, direct costs, gross profit, indirect expenses and net profit, shown for the month with the year-to-date column beside it and the same month last year beside that.
The decision it drives: Whether the month was actually good or merely busy. A month with record sales and a falling gross margin is a warning, and only the comparative columns show it.
Balance sheet as at month end
Assets, liabilities and capital as on the last day of the month. Most owners skip this one.
The decision it drives: Whether the profit you booked is turning into anything. Profit that keeps landing in receivables and inventory rather than in the bank is the most common way a growing business runs out of money.
Cash flow
Where the cash came from and where it went, split between operating, investing and financing. Profit is an opinion formed by accounting policy; cash is a fact.
The decision it drives: Whether you can fund next month's purchases, salaries and statutory dues without the overdraft. For startups this is also the runway calculation - closing cash divided by average monthly net burn.
Revenue analysis
Sales broken down the way the business is actually run - by customer, product or service line, branch, GSTIN, channel. Top ten customers with their share of the total.
The decision it drives: Concentration risk and where to put sales effort. If one customer is 40 percent of revenue, that is not a sales report, it is a risk report.
Gross margin
Margin by product line, service line or contract - not one blended percentage for the whole business.
The decision it drives: What to price up and what to stop selling. Almost every business we take on has at least one line it is selling enthusiastically at a loss, and a blended margin hides it completely.
Expense analysis
Indirect expenses by head, with the month against the average of the preceding three months and against budget.
The decision it drives: Which costs have crept. Expense creep rarely announces itself in a single large entry; it arrives as ten heads that are each 15 percent higher than they were in April.
Receivables ageing
Outstanding customer invoices bucketed - current, 1-30 days overdue, 31-60, 61-90, over 90 - customer by customer, with the debtor days figure.
The decision it drives: Who gets a call this week, whose supply gets stopped, and what to provide for. An ageing report nobody acts on within a week of receiving it is a filing exercise.
Payables ageing
The same treatment for what you owe, with due dates rather than just age. MSME suppliers flagged separately.
The decision it drives: The payment run - what must go out this week, what can wait, and which supplier is about to stop supplying. Delayed payment to MSME suppliers carries its own consequences under the MSMED Act and a disclosure obligation at year end.
Budget versus actual and variance analysis
Each significant line shown as budget, actual, variance in rupees and variance in percentage, with a written note against anything over a threshold you set.
The decision it drives: Everything, really. This is the report that turns the MIS from a scorecard into a management tool. The number tells you something moved; the note tells you why, and only the second one is actionable.
Working capital and key ratios
Debtor days, creditor days, inventory days, the resulting cash conversion cycle, current ratio, and where there is borrowing, the debt service coverage ratio and any ratio your sanction letter names as a covenant.
The decision it drives: Whether the working capital cycle is lengthening. If debtor days move from 45 to 62 over a quarter, you have effectively lent your customers a large sum without deciding to.
That is the core pack. Beyond it, businesses add what their own operations demand - order book and pipeline, capacity utilisation, headcount and cost per employee, branch-wise contribution, project profitability. The core reports are financial. The additions are what make the pack yours. For online sellers, margin has to be pushed down to item level after returns, marketplace commission and shipping - see e-commerce accounting for how that pack differs.
Why most MIS packs are useless
We review a lot of existing packs during onboarding. Most fail for one of four reasons, and usually more than one.
It arrives too late to act on
A pack for June that lands in the third week of July is a history lesson. The collection calls, the payment run and the pricing correction have already been made without it. Speed beats polish: a pack that is 95 percent right on the 10th is worth several times more than a perfect one on the 25th.
It does not tie to the books
The MIS is built in a spreadsheet maintained beside the accounting software instead of produced out of it. Every month a small difference creeps in and nobody reconciles. Six months later the MIS says one revenue figure, the trial balance says another and the GSTR-1 says a third.
It measures what is easy rather than what matters
Sales, expenses and bank balance are easy to pull. Gross margin by product, debtor days and variance against budget are harder, so they quietly drop out. If your MIS can tell you what you sold but not what you made on it, this is what has happened.
Nobody decided who the reader is
The same twenty-page pack goes to the owner, the bank and the investor group. Too detailed for the board, not detailed enough for operating decisions, wrong format for the bank. A pack designed for everybody is a pack designed for nobody.
Making the MIS tie back to your books and your GST returns.
Here is the test we apply to any pack, whether we prepared it or inherited it. Five numbers in the pack must agree with five numbers outside it. If they do not, the pack does not go out until the difference is explained in writing.
- 01
Revenue against GSTR-1
Turnover in the MIS should reconcile to the outward supplies declared in your GSTR-1 for the same period. It will rarely match to the rupee, and it is not supposed to. Exempt and non-GST revenue sits in the books but not in taxable outward supply. Credit notes may be booked in one period and declared in another. Schedule I supplies to related parties, stock transfers between your own GSTINs and advances on services appear on one side and not the other. Every one of those is explainable. What is not explainable is a gap nobody has looked at.
- 02
Purchases against GSTR-2B
Purchases and input tax credit in the MIS should tie to your GSTR-2B for the month. Where they do not, the difference is usually a supplier who has not filed their GSTR-1 - credit you are carrying in your books but cannot use. That belongs in the pack as a list of suppliers to chase, not as a variance. The Invoice Management System has made this sharper: you can accept, reject or keep an invoice pending, and where you take no action the invoice is deemed accepted into your GSTR-2B. Somebody has to be looking at that.
- 03
TDS in the books against Form 26AS
Two directions, and both get missed. TDS you have deducted and deposited should agree with your challans and with the quarterly return. TDS your customers deducted from your payments should appear in your Form 26AS - and if you booked a receivable net of TDS that never shows up there, you find out at filing time, months too late to get the deductor to correct it. A monthly comparison turns a year-end problem into a phone call.
- 04
Bank balance against the bank statement
The most basic tie-out, and the one most often skipped in an MIS built in Excel. Closing bank balance in the pack must equal the balance in the statement, with every reconciling item listed - cheques issued but not presented, deposits in transit, bank charges not yet booked. If it does not reconcile, no other number in the pack can be relied on either.
- 05
Closing stock against the stock statement your bank holds
If you have a cash credit or overdraft facility you are already submitting a monthly stock and book debt statement to your bank. That statement and your MIS must show the same closing stock and the same debtors. They frequently do not, because the stock statement comes from a physical count and the MIS from the books. Two different numbers describing the same stock, both submitted by the same company, one of them to a lender. Worth fixing before someone at the bank notices.
Why a hand-built Excel MIS drifts
None of this is a criticism of Excel. Every pack we produce ends up in Excel or PDF. The problem is where the numbers come from.
A hand-built MIS is typed. Somebody opens last month's file, saves it under a new name, and updates the figures from a set of reports, an email and their own memory. That process fails in predictable ways. Late entries posted after the MIS was prepared never make it into the sheet. Provisions, depreciation and year-end adjustments passed by the auditor go into the books and not into the spreadsheet. Rows get inserted above a SUM range. A branch is added and nobody extends the consolidation formula. A closing balance is hardcoded once to make the sheet balance, and it stays hardcoded for eleven months.
The fix is structural, not clerical. The pack has to be generated from the trial balance, with the tie-outs above run as a checklist every single month, and any difference written down rather than plugged. That is the difference between a template and a reporting process, and it is what we are actually selling.
A bank, an investor and an owner need three different packs
This is where most MIS work goes wrong in a way that costs real money. One generic pack gets sent to all three readers, and it serves none of them properly.
MIS for your bank
If you hold a cash credit or overdraft facility, your bank is already a monthly reader of your numbers. It wants the stock statement and book debt statement in its own format, from which drawing power is computed after applying the margins in your sanction letter; the ageing of those book debts, since debts beyond a stated period are usually excluded; creditors for the same stock; and at renewal, the ratios your facility is covenanted on, along with quarterly information statements where the sanction requires them. A monthly pack that already produces these figures in the bank's format turns the renewal into a formality instead of an annual scramble.
MIS for investors and the board
Investors want the operating metrics - monthly recurring revenue, customer acquisition cost, retention, gross margin, burn and runway - reconciled to the books. That last part separates a credible startup MIS from a slide deck. If the revenue in your investor update has never been tied to your trial balance and your GSTR-1, the divergence surfaces during due diligence for the next round, at the worst possible moment. A board pack also needs shape: a one-page summary at the front, variance explained in sentences, detail behind it as an annexure.
MIS for the owner
The operating pack. Gross margin by line, receivables ageing with a call list, payables due next fortnight, cash position and the variance notes. Short, early, and every report in it should end in something to do. If a report in the owner's pack has not caused an action in six months, take it out.
We build the pack around whoever is reading it. In most engagements that means one core set of reports and two derived views - one for the bank in the bank's format, one for the board - rather than a single document that tries to do all three jobs.
Who needs MIS reporting
Not every business does. A proprietor with fifty transactions a month and one product does not need a twelve-report pack; a well-kept ledger and a monthly P&L will do. MIS earns its cost when the business has become too complex for the owner to hold in their head.
- Startups - Investors, a board and a burn rate all exist, and numbers are reported outside the company from a very early stage.
- SMEs past roughly Rs 5 crore of turnover - The point at which product lines, staff and branches multiply and the blended view stops being informative.
- Any business with a bank facility - CC or OD, term loan, or a limit up for renewal. The bank is a monthly reader; you may as well report to it deliberately.
- Businesses with external investors - Anyone who has taken outside money owes a reconciled monthly number to somebody.
- Multi-location or multi-GSTIN businesses - Consolidation is a real exercise, and branch-wise performance is invisible without it.
- Businesses where the owner has stopped seeing the numbers - Every growing business passes a stage where the founder can no longer feel from daily activity whether the month was good. The pack replaces instinct with evidence, and it is usually overdue by the time anyone notices.
Why the 10th matters
Monthly is right for almost every business. Quarterly is too slow to correct anything - a bad pricing decision runs for three months before it shows. Our commitment is the 10th of the following month, and it is not arbitrary.
- Early enough that the month just closed is still current. Decisions taken on the 10th still affect the quarter.
- Before the 11th, when GSTR-1 is due for monthly filers, so revenue in the pack is already reconciled to what is about to be declared.
- Leaves room before GSTR-3B on the 20th, so any input tax credit problem the pack surfaces can still be dealt with in the same return cycle.
- Late enough for the books to genuinely be closed - bank reconciled, GSTR-2B matched, TDS challans deposited by the 7th, provisions passed.
A pack any earlier is usually a pack prepared before the books were closed, which puts you back in the tie-out problem. A pack later than the 15th has lost most of its value regardless of how good it is. The monthly rhythm that produces this is set out on the accounting and bookkeeping services page.
Where the reports come from
Both TallyPrime and Zoho Books produce the underlying reports - P&L, balance sheet, ratio analysis, ageing, cash flow, budget variance - natively, and both export to Excel. TallyPrime 7.1 also generates financial statements in Schedule III Division I format, which makes the bridge from monthly MIS to year-end accounts considerably shorter.
What neither does out of the box is the part that matters: reconcile the pack to your GST returns, to Form 26AS and to the stock statement your bank holds, and write the variance notes. Software produces reports. It does not produce judgement about what the reports mean or whether they can be relied upon, and that is the work.
We prepare the pack inside whichever system you already run - see Tally accounting services and Zoho Books accounting. The licence and the data stay in your name.
TallyPrime and Zoho Books are products of Tally Solutions and Zoho Corporation respectively. Regikart is not a partner or reseller of either; we are a CA firm that works in both.
How Regikart delivers MIS reporting
Inside the monthly accounting engagement
Most of our MIS work is not a separate service. It is the last step of the monthly close. Because the same team posted the entries, reconciled the bank, matched GSTR-2B and deposited the TDS challans, the pack comes out of the books rather than alongside them, and the five tie-outs are already done by the time it is prepared.
A monthly pack is included in every accounting retainer, from Rs 2,499 a month upward. The core reports come with the entry tier. The fuller pack - budget versus actual with written variance notes, the bank-format stock and book debt statements, branch or segment cuts and a review call - comes in from the Growth tier and above. The tiers are published on the monthly accounting engagement page. If you want the finance function without the pack being an add-on, virtual accounting covers the same ground with a named team.
As a standalone MIS engagement
We also prepare MIS for businesses whose books are maintained elsewhere - by an in-house accountant, or by another firm you are happy with. This works, and it is a common arrangement.
One honest condition attached to it. A standalone engagement needs books that are actually reconciled. We cannot produce a pack that ties to your GST returns and your bank from a trial balance that does not itself tie. So the first thing we do is review the books as they stand, and there are three possible outcomes: they are clean and we start next month; there are specific gaps - an unreconciled bank account, a GSTR-2B mismatch nobody has cleared, opening balances that were never tied - which we quote separately to fix first; or the books need enough repair that a catch-up engagement makes more sense. We will tell you which of the three applies before you commit to anything, and we would rather lose the engagement than issue a pack we cannot stand behind.
What MIS reporting costs
Inside a monthly accounting retainer: included. Retainers start at Rs 2,499 per month and are priced by transaction volume; the tiers are listed in full on the accounting and bookkeeping services page.
As a standalone engagement: quoted after we have reviewed the state of your books. We do not publish a figure for this and we would be sceptical of anyone who does, because the work depends almost entirely on what condition the ledgers are in, how many entities, GSTINs and branches consolidate into the pack, and who the pack has to satisfy. Preparing a five-report owner's pack from clean single-entity books and preparing a bank-format pack plus a board pack across four GSTINs are not the same job.
The review itself is quick - send us a Tally backup or Zoho access and we will come back with a written note on what state the books are in and what the pack would take. All fees are exclusive of GST.
Request an MIS quoteWhy businesses choose Regikart for MIS
The pack comes out of the books, not beside them
Every figure traces to a ledger, and the five tie-outs are run before it is issued.
A CA reviews it before it goes out
The accounting practice is led by Deepak Jaiswal, FCA. The person preparing the pack is not the last person to look at it.
One firm covers the books, the GST returns and the pack
No gap between your bookkeeper and your return filer for numbers to get lost in - precisely the gap that makes most MIS packs disagree with the GST portal.
Variance is explained in sentences
A number that moved with no note against it is not a finished report.
You keep your data and your licence
Your TallyPrime company or Zoho Books organisation stays in your name.
Four offices, delivery across India
Kolkata, Delhi, Gurugram and Pune, with an in-house CA and CS team.
MIS reporting questions, answered
Questions, answered.
If you don't see your question here, write to us - a senior partner usually replies within a couple of business hours.
Still have questions?
Book a free 20-minute consult with a senior partner - we'll walk through your case and outline next steps.
Talk to a partner →What pairs well with MIS reporting
Monthly accounting
The close that produces the pack - entries, reconciliation, GST and TDS on a fixed cycle.
Financial statements
The statutory year-end side: Schedule III balance sheet, P&L and notes.
Virtual accounting
A named finance team without the payroll, with the pack included rather than bolted on.
E-commerce accounting
Where margin has to be pushed to item level after returns, commission and shipping.
Get the pack prepared, reconciled and in your inbox by the 10th.
Send us a Tally backup or Zoho access and we will tell you what state the books are in and what the pack would take - in writing, before you commit to anything.
Reviewed by CA & CS Team · Regikart · Last updated 7 September 2026