HourSlip VS Opalstack

HourSlip's answer

India's independent services professionals — developers, designers, consultants, writers, marketers, architects, creatives — who invoice clients directly and manage their own compliance.

The defining trait is activity, not size or job title: you raise invoices, someone deducts TDS before paying you, and nobody else is filing your GST or working out your advance tax. It applies whether you bill hourly, fixed-fee, on retainer or by milestone, and whether your clients are Indian, foreign or both. GST registration is not a prerequisite — unregistered users get Bill of Supply and an alert as they approach the ₹20 lakh threshold, because TDS and advance-tax pain start at the very first invoice, long before registration does.

Who it is not for, deliberately: goods traders, retailers and manufacturers, who need inventory, HSN and COGS that HourSlip does not and will not have. Accounting firms are also not the user — a CA can be given read-only access to a client's books, but the account always belongs to the professional.

HourSlip's answer

It is built for one specific person: the Indian independent services professional who invoices clients directly and handles their own compliance.

Most Indian billing software is really built for shopkeepers — inventory, HSN codes, stock, goods billing. Most freelancer software is built for Americans. Neither handles the things that actually consume an Indian professional's time: GST with the correct CGST/SGST or IGST split, the TDS a client silently deducted before paying, advance tax before 234B/C interest starts, and 44ADA presumptive taxation where you qualify.

HourSlip closes the whole money loop on one dataset. Raise a GST-compliant invoice, share it as a link the client pays by UPI or card, log the TDS they deducted across 10 sections, reconcile it against Form 26AS, and see the resulting advance-tax position — without re-entering anything or reconciling three tools in March.

What it deliberately does not do is as important: no inventory, no HSN, no stock, no goods billing. Services only.

HourSlip's answer

Because the alternatives each solve one fragment of the problem, and the seams between them are where the money leaks.

Zoho Invoice and Refrens raise a clean GST invoice, but neither tells you what tax you owe or tracks the TDS your client deducted. ClearTax and Quicko handle the return at filing time, but they do not run your invoicing or chase your receivables through the year. Vyapar and Tally are built around stock, purchase and goods — a services business has none of that, so most of the product is dead weight. FreshBooks and Bonsai are excellent and entirely foreign: no GST, no TDS, no 26AS, no 44ADA.

The real incumbent is a spreadsheet plus a CA in March, and that is exactly how people end up paying 234B/C interest on tax they could have scheduled in June.

HourSlip keeps invoicing, TDS, GST returns, expenses and tax planning on one dataset, so the advance-tax figure on your dashboard is derived from the same invoices you actually raised. Nothing is re-keyed, and nothing disagrees with anything else.

The honest counter-case: if you sell goods, need inventory or HSN, or want a full double-entry ledger, choose Vyapar, Tally or Zoho Books instead. HourSlip is deliberately not that.

HourSlip's answer

HourSlip is built by a solo founder in India.

The problem that started it is one every independent professional here recognises. You are squeezed between software built for shopkeepers — Vyapar, Tally, everything organised around stock and purchase — and software built for Americans, like FreshBooks and Bonsai, which have never heard of GST or TDS. Nothing in between handled GST, TDS, advance tax and 44ADA together for a one-person services business. So the work fell into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet turned into a panic every March.

The specific thing that stung was TDS. A client deducts 10% before paying, you forget which invoice it came from, and by the time you sit down with Form 26AS a year later you cannot reconcile it. That money is yours, and people routinely lose track of it.

So the product was built the other way round from most invoicing tools: start from what you actually owe and what you are actually owed, and let the invoice be an input to that rather than the end of the story.

The name is a leftover from the timer it began as. The product moved on to the money side long ago, and time tracking is now entirely optional — you can run the whole thing without ever starting a timer. The name stayed because changing it seemed less useful than shipping.