About KhataGO
WhatsApp-first bookkeeping for Indian small businesses
Why it exists
Most small businesses in India already run on WhatsApp. Orders, payments and udhaar reminders live in chat threads and a notebook. Accounting software asks the owner to leave that thread and learn a second system, so it mostly goes unused — and GST filing becomes a monthly scramble with the CA.
KhataGO meets the business where its records already are. Send a message — "Sharma ko 5000 udhaar diya", or a photo of a bill — and it becomes a structured ledger entry with GST worked out, the receivable tracked, and a Tally-compatible export ready for the accountant.
It is early access and solo-built. There is a waitlist, not a sales team.
Who built it
Shailesh Chaudhari
Software engineer — backend and distributed systems
KhataGO is designed, built and run by one engineer. The decisions that shape it — WhatsApp as the interface, Postgres as the queue, GST and Tally as first-class features — come from building for the way small Indian businesses actually keep records, not from a feature checklist.
The engineering it is known for
Not a chat wrapper around an AI model — an idempotency-guarded transaction pipeline.
Webhook idempotency
WhatsApp delivers webhooks at-least-once. Every payload is HMAC-verified, then de-duplicated on a unique message-ID column before any AI call — so a retry can never create a second entry or a second paid model call.
Database-enforced dedup and claims
No Redis. Dedup is a unique constraint; work is claimed with an atomic conditional UPDATE; the queue is Postgres itself, drained by a worker with backoff and jitter, and a dead-letter queue whose replays are audited.
Tool-calling agent
Gemini with ten function-calling tools — transactions, receivables, payments, invoices, reminders and summaries — capped at five tool turns per message, plus vision OCR for bill photos.
GST and Tally export
GST split into CGST/SGST or IGST with paisa-exact rounding, monthly collected-vs-paid reports, CSV export, and Tally-compatible XML vouchers for the accountant.