India’s financial year runs 1 April to 31 March, and for a freelancer that date is less of a deadline than a line. Everything you invoiced before it belongs to one year’s income. Everything after belongs to the next. Almost nothing about the work changes on 1 April, but where the money lands does, and a few things stop being fixable.
Quick answer: before 31 March, invoice the work you have already finished, pay your March advance tax instalment if you owe one, check that the tax your clients withheld actually shows against your PAN, and decide honestly which unpaid invoices are never arriving. Everything else can wait until you file.
What 31 March actually decides
Income belongs to the year you earned it in, not the year the money turns up. So an invoice you raise on 28 March sits in this year even if the client pays you in May. One you raise on 2 April sits in the next year even if the work was finished in February.
That is the whole mechanic, and it cuts both ways. If this year has been strong and next year looks quieter, finishing the paperwork early pulls income into a year that is already taxed higher. If this year has been thin, the same move is in your favour. Most freelancers do not need to optimise this. They just need to know it is happening, so the number they see when they file is not a surprise.
Invoice the work that is already done
The most common year-end mistake is not tax. It is finished work that was never billed, because the project drifted and nobody sent the invoice.
Go through everything you delivered since January and check each one has an invoice against it. Not a WhatsApp message agreeing an amount. An actual numbered invoice. Work billed six weeks late is harder to chase, because the client’s own books have moved on and the person who approved it may have too.
If you have a running list of what is pending, paid and overdue, this takes ten minutes. If you do not, it takes an afternoon and you will probably still miss one.
The March advance tax instalment
If you owe advance tax, the final instalment of the year is due on 15 March, and that is two weeks before the year even ends. Miss it and interest runs from the start of the next year until you pay.
Freelancers taxed under the presumptive scheme get the simpler version of this: one payment, the full amount, by the same March date. No June, September or December instalments to track.
The full mechanics, including the threshold that decides whether any of this applies to you, are in advance tax for freelancers. Read that one before March rather than during it.
Check what your clients withheld
If a client deducted tax before paying you, that money is not gone. It is sitting against your PAN as credit, and you claim it when you file.
The catch is that it only counts if the client actually deposited it and filed correctly. Log in to the income tax portal and check your annual tax statement against your own records. A mismatch found in March is a phone call. The same mismatch found while you are filing is a problem, because by then the client has closed their books and the person who ran payroll has stopped replying.
Worth knowing: most freelancers billing individuals and small businesses will find nothing withheld at all, because a small client is usually not required to deduct anything. That is normal, not an error. What to do when TDS is deducted from your invoice covers both cases.
Know exactly what is pending, paid and overdue before the year closes. Create an invoice from one WhatsApp message and the tracking comes with it.Try Riffit freeDecide which invoices are not coming
Every freelancer has one. The client who went quiet, the project that died mid-way, the founder who stopped answering in September.
You do not have to keep carrying it. Year end is the natural moment to look at each overdue invoice and put it in one of three piles: still chaseable, worth one last attempt, or written off. The point is not the accounting treatment. It is that an invoice you have privately given up on should not still be sitting in your pending total, quietly making your numbers wrong.
If it is in the second pile, send the follow-up before the year closes. A March nudge referencing the financial year lands better than a random one in June, because the client’s finance side is thinking about the same date you are.
What does not reset
Plenty of freelancers assume more changes on 1 April than actually does.
Unpaid invoices do not disappear. A client who owes you from January still owes you in May, and the invoice keeps its original number and date. Your contracts do not lapse. Your GST position does not automatically change, though the turnover clock that decides whether you need to register does start again, which matters if you were close to the threshold.
What does reset is your invoice numbering, and that is a small job worth doing properly on the first day rather than the fifteenth. A freelance invoice numbering system that does not break covers what to change and what to leave alone.
The short version
Invoice what is finished. Pay the March instalment if it applies. Check the withheld tax shows up. Be honest about what is never arriving. Then close the laptop, because the rest of it belongs to the filing season, and that is months away.
31 March. The Indian financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March, which is different from the calendar year and different from most Western countries. Income belongs to the year you earned it in, so an invoice raised on 28 March counts in that year even if the client pays you months later.