Aug 4, 2023

3 min read04 Aug 2023, 01:41 PM IST Saurav Mukherjee Clear provides entrepreneurs and CFOs with real-time data insights and analytics about their businesses through comprehensive reports, dashboards, and analytics tools, says founder and CEO Archit Gupta. Here are excerpts. Technological innovations have eased income tax and GST-related issues for both individuals and companies. However, other issues like company law compliances, late penalties, tax automation, etc remain a challenge. Clear founder and CEO Archit Gupta opened up with Mint and shared his views. Here are excerpts: 1. Beginning ClearTax as an income tax return filing website, it now seeks to be a B2B SaaS company. How are you planning to do that? Archit Gupta: ClearTax began as a tax filing solution over ten years ago. We have rebranded Clear which extends far beyond just tax compliance. We offer all the solutions through the Clear Finance Cloud, that brings both upstream and downstream financial processes together. We have now forayed into the invoice discounting space and acquired Xpedize, a solution to bring accounts payable and treasury together. We also acquired CimplyFive for the automation of company law compliance. 2. How is Clear building a suite of enterprise finance and compliance applications aiming to provide the taxpayer with a seamless experience? Archit Gupta: Clear, formerly ClearTax, has built the Clear Max ITC solution to optimize input tax credit through AI-based tools. Through Clear Max ITC, we have unblocked over ₹9,000 crore for over 3,000 businesses. It’s a powerful tool that assures businesses of an increase in their cash flows by optimizing their input tax credit. We introduced the Clear e-Invoicing solution for the bulk generation of thousands of e-invoices in real-time, guaranteeing 99.99% uptime. We offer integration with the Clear e-Way Bill solution for faster, more efficient, and error-free compliance. For non-e-invoicing customers, we have Clear Invoicing for generating GST -compliant invoices that can integrate deeply with your order management system. By leveraging Clear’s connected finance ecosystem, the data from your invoices and e-invoices seamlessly flows into the draft GST returns with a click of a button. Our automated and real-time reconciliations help every enterprise be aware if their data does not match or if they are at risk of paying interest and penalties. We also developed a CFO dashboard that puts vital financial information, insights, and analytics at their fingertips. It features intelligent reports that provide actionable insights for informed decision-making and highlight missed financial opportunities. Our goal is to simplify finance processes for businesses and give business leaders a single source of truth. 3. How are you, at Clear, building a connected finance ecosystem to address these challenges? Archit Gupta: Clear helps organizations unify interconnected processes into a workflow. The Clear Finance Cloud operates seamlessly with major enterprise ERP systems, automating processes across accounts payable, vendor risk management, tax compliance and optimization, secretarial compliance, invoice discounting and financing, e-invoicing, and more. Our goal is to offer solutions with complementing capabilities, enriching the finance function and providing business leaders with a single source of truth. 4. In what ways does Clear support entrepreneurs, CFOs, and the tax teams in organizations? Archit Gupta: We help enterprises build a connected finance ecosystem by putting all their critical processes in auto-pilot mode to ensure higher productivity, better outcomes, greater control, and improved finance value. Our automated finance solutions empower finance teams to focus on value-added tasks and strategic financial management rather than rely on manual, error-prone processes. Clear provides entrepreneurs and CFOs with real-time data insights and analytics about their businesses through comprehensive reports, dashboards, and analytics tools. This helps enable data-driven decision-making and enhances financial visibility. Hence, every single solution by Clear fosters strong collaboration between technology and finance. 5. What's next? Archit Gupta: Clear has a presence across India and the Middle East. With the success of E-invoicing in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), the company is now well-positioned to help businesses in areas such as digital payments, digitization of business processes, government mandates on digitization of tax and compliance, and overall increasing adoption of cloud-based technology solutions. It plans to launch its next set of products in the country which will help businesses in VAT compliance, accounts payables and receivables automation, and e-payments in the next few months. Post-Saudi Arabia, we plan to rapidly expand into the rest of the 5 GCC countries. ABOUT THE AUTHOR