Multi-office readiness is the organisational groundwork a CA firm should have in place before opening a second or third branch — clear conventions for who owns a client relationship, how staffing decisions get made across offices, and how partners want to report on branch performance. Multi-office administration in software can record that structure once it exists; it's a tagging layer for members and clients, not a substitute for deciding the structure in the first place.
What growth exposes
A single-office firm can run on informal habits — everyone knows who's doing what, who the client calls, how work gets assigned. A second office removes the shared room those habits lived in. Questions that never needed an explicit answer before (who actually owns this client relationship, who decides which office staffs which engagement) suddenly need one, because the people involved no longer overhear each other's conversations.
Before opening the second office
- A clear convention for which partner or office "owns" each existing client relationship, even informally
- Agreement on how cross-office staffing decisions get made during busy season — who decides, and on what basis
- A plan for who reviews work originating from the new office, especially in its first year
- Clarity on billing and fee-sharing between offices, settled before it becomes a dispute
- A shared understanding that opening an office doesn't mean walling off its clients or its staff from the rest of the firm
What software can and can't do here
| Decision the firm has to make | What multi-office administration records |
|---|---|
| Who owns each client relationship | A client's office tag, once the firm decides it |
| Who staffs the new office's engagements | Nothing — staffing is set per engagement, same as always |
| How branch performance gets reviewed | A filterable list of members and clients by office, for reporting |
| Whether offices run as one firm or separate practices | Nothing — this is the firm's own governance choice, not a software setting |
Common practice, not a requirement
Firms that grow smoothly into a second office tend to have already settled the relationship-ownership question informally before opening day, and then simply record it once the tool is in place — they're not using the software to decide something the partners haven't yet.
Don't open a second office expecting software to settle an unresolved internal disagreement about staffing or client ownership. Office tagging records a decision the firm has made; it doesn't make the decision for the firm, and it was never designed to restrict access as a way of enforcing one partner's territory.
How we think about this
Multi-office administration, as Lekhya builds it, assumes the firm has already decided how it wants to organise itself, and gives that structure a place to live — office names, member tags, client tags — without adding a second access-control system on top. The structure comes from the firm; the software just makes it visible.
This is practical guidance written for audit teams, not an authoritative statement of any standard or statute. Standards, forms and timelines change. Check the current text issued by the ICAI and the relevant authority before relying on anything here in an audit file.
Related resources
- Audit workflow & automationMulti-office administration: organising a firm by branch without rebuilding access controlA firm with three branches needs to know who sits where. It doesn't need a second, parallel access-control system to find that out.
- Audit workflow & automationAudit firm succession and knowledge-transfer riskThe departing senior doesn't take a skill the firm can rehire for. They take the specific knowledge of why last year's unusual transaction wasn't actually a problem.
- Audit workflow & automationMulti-partner firm technology decisions: who needs to be in the roomA managing partner, an audit partner, and a quality-control partner are evaluating three different things when they look at the same software. Here's what each one actually cares about.
Free tools, no signup
Each one reads a file entirely in your browser — or, for two of them, just answers a few questions — and nothing is ever uploaded.
- Purchase register checkDuplicate payments, round-sum amounts, weekend-dated invoices, incomplete records.
- GSTR-2B reconcilerMatches your purchase register against GSTR-2B — missing invoices either side, amount mismatches.
- Bank reconciliation checkerMatches your cash book against a bank statement — what's outstanding on each side.
- Fixed asset register checkDuplicate asset codes, missing location or useful life, negative net book value.
- Payroll red-flag scannerBank accounts shared across employees, and records missing an ID, PAN or salary.
- CARO applicability checkerAnswer a few questions about the company and see which CARO 2020 clauses likely apply.
- MSME payment delay checkerMSME-flagged invoices paid — or still unpaid — beyond the 45-day Section 22 limit.
- Related-party transaction screenerTransactions above a threshold you set with no approval reference, grouped by counterparty.
- Depreciation useful life checkerCompares a useful life in use against the Schedule II, Part C indicative figure.
- Materiality calculatorOverall and performance materiality against PBT, revenue, assets or equity, with reasoning shown.
- Sample size calculatorStatistical sample size for a test of controls or a substantive test of detail.