We started TraCarta in 2013, because nobody else was going to.

TraCarta was incorporated in 2013, when the work looked different. The Goods and Services Tax came into force in July 2017, and within a year we had reshaped the practice around what the new regime would demand of Indian corporates, reconciling input tax credit against vendor filings, on a cycle that would never quite line up neatly, for invoice volumes that nobody had previously had to track at this level of granularity. The CFOs we spoke to in 2017 and 2018 said the same thing: somebody is going to have to do this, but I don’t know who.

Travel was the most extreme version of the problem. Every airline runs its own GST portal. Every portal has its own login, its own format, its own download mechanic. A mid-sized Indian company booking across the full set of domestic and international carriers was suddenly facing thousands of invoices a quarter, scattered across systems that didn’t talk to each other, with credit notes and debit notes and document types that no ERP knew what to do with. The recoverable rupee was right there in the data. Recovering it was a job nobody owned.

We weren’t the first to notice.

Several incumbents had already added “travel GST” as a feature inside their general-purpose tax platforms. We tried a few of them, on behalf of friends running finance teams in Gurugram and Mumbai. They handled the obvious part, pulling invoices, and missed everything that mattered: the reconciliation against GSTR-2B, the credit notes that came in three weeks late, the dispute path when an airline’s portal had the wrong GSTIN. Finance teams ran them, then quietly went back to the Excel they trusted.

That gave us the question that has shaped the firm since: why does travel-GST reconciliation deserve to be a feature of someone else’s product, instead of a firm of its own? Our answer, then and now, is that it doesn’t. The work has six distinct disciplines, extraction, reconciliation, journalisation, delivery, integration, partnership, and pretending it’s one thing is what makes most platforms in this category hollow underneath. We built TraCarta to take each of those six disciplines as seriously as it deserves.

What we’ve learned since.

Six years in, the things that have surprised us most are also the things we’re proudest of having got right. We learned that customers don’t want a discovery call, they want a real number on their own data, and they want it inside a week. So the recon audit is free, costs us money, and is the conversation we start every relationship with. We learned that delivery is its own discipline, equal in difficulty to the reconciliation engine itself, and that a correct number nobody can act on is the same as a wrong one. So SkyBoard and SkyConnect are real modules, not feature flags. We learned that TMC partners need a contractual non-compete, not a verbal one, because verbal ones get tested and break. So SkyLink ships with one.

The firm we run today is small, and we like it that way. The team is distributed across the country, Gurugram is the registered office, but engineers, tax researchers and customer-ops people are in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bengaluru. The platform runs entirely on infrastructure located in India. We don’t replicate customer data across borders, we don’t pool data across customers, and we don’t pursue a TMC partner’s accounts. These aren’t marketing claims; they’re design decisions we made early and have refused to revisit.

Where we’re going.

TraCarta is at six modules today, fully covering airline GST. We’ve mapped the adjacent categories, hotel GST, vendor-services GST, expense GST, and we know what each would take to do properly. We have not committed to any of them yet, because we’d rather be precisely the firm for one job than vaguely useful for six. When new modules ship, they’ll get their own pages, their own pricing, and their own layer in the SkySuite architecture. The suite grows by adding doors, not by overloading existing ones.

If anything on this page resonated, that’s a real reason to write to us. The conversations that go well are the ones where someone reads what we believe and decides it matches what they’re looking for. One email is enough; the person who replies is usually one of us.