UDIN Tracking for CA Firms

The key question: if a bank called this afternoon to confirm a net worth certificate your firm signed seven months ago, how long would it take to find the UDIN?

For most firms, the answer is "longer than it should." The UDIN was generated on the ICAI portal, typed onto the certificate, and the signed PDF was emailed to the client. After that, the number lives in that PDF, in a sent-mail folder, and perhaps in a partner's personal spreadsheet. Nobody is being careless. There's simply no single place in the firm where every UDIN goes.

UDIN tracking for CA firms means having that place. Think of it like a cheque book's counterfoils. You'd never hand out cheques without keeping the counterfoil, because the counterfoil is how you know later what you signed, for whom and for how much. A UDIN register is the firm's counterfoil for every document a member certifies.

A Real-Life Scenario: Iyer & Co, Coimbatore

Iyer & Co is an illustrative two-partner firm in Coimbatore with around 350 clients. Its audit work is steady, but most of its UDINs don't come from audits. They come from certificates: net worth certificates for visa and loan applications, turnover certificates for tenders, Form 15CB for foreign remittances, and assorted certificates banks ask for at short notice. In a busy year, the firm generates several hundred UDINs.

Three things happened in one quarter.

• The bank call. A bank manager emailed to verify a net worth certificate issued in November. CA Lakshmi Iyer spent 40 minutes searching sent emails before finding the PDF, and with it, the UDIN.
• The review request. During a quality review, the firm was asked for a list of certificates signed by each partner during the year. Building that list from PDFs and email took an articled assistant the best part of two days.
• The unbilled work. When the partners finally compiled the list, they found 18 certificates from the quarter that had never been invoiced. They were small jobs, ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 each, done in a rush for regular clients, and they added up to roughly ₹60,000 of work the firm had signed for but not billed.

None of these is unusual. Each one is what happens when the UDIN is treated as the end of the job rather than a record that connects the job to the client and the bill.

What a Good UDIN Register Should Hold

Whatever system a firm uses, a UDIN register is only useful if every entry answers the questions that come up later: which client the document was for, what kind of document it was, which member signed it, when it was issued, and which piece of work it belongs to. In Turia, the client and the task carry most of that context automatically, because the UDIN is recorded on work that already exists.

It also helps to treat the register as part of the firm's quality controls, not a side list. ICAI's quality review process expects firms to be able to show how their engagements are documented and controlled, and a complete, searchable UDIN record is one of the simplest ways to show that for certification work.

Easy Rules to Remember

Safe: record every UDIN in one firm-wide register on the day it's generated, against the client and the task.

Risky: leaving UDINs only inside signed PDFs and emails. They're there, but nobody can find or count them when it matters.

Safer still: make "create the task first" the rule for every certificate, even the urgent ones, so the UDIN, the work and the invoice always stay together.

Where This Connects

UDIN tracking sits on Turia's task management and client management, alongside compliance management. If certificates are part of a group's work, client grouping lets you bill the holding company for all of it. Read what CA firms say about Turia, or see Turia's pricing.