How to make a client ITR summary from the JSON file
After you file a return, the e-filing portal gives you a JSON file — complete, but unreadable for a professional. Here's how to turn it into a clean, professional summary in a faster way and deliver it to client.
Every practising chartered accountant knows the JSON file. Once a return is prepared or filed on the income tax e-filing portal, you can download the return data as a .json file. It contains every figure in the return — but in a raw, machine-readable format that no one would ever want to look at.
Yet clients routinely ask for a summary: a simple statement of where their income came from, what deductions were claimed, and what tax they finally paid. Preparing that summary by hand, for every client, is one of those small recurring chores that quietly eats hours during filing season. This guide covers how to do it — the manual way, and a faster way.
What the ITR JSON actually contains
The JSON file mirrors the structure of the return itself. Broadly, it holds the taxpayer's personal and filing details, the income computed under each of the five heads — salary, house property, business or profession, capital gains, and other sources — the deductions claimed under Chapter VI-A, the total income and the tax computed on it, and finally the taxes paid through TDS, advance tax and self-assessment. Everything a summary needs is in there; it's just buried in nested keys and codes.
How the summary really gets prepared — and the gap no one checks
Here's the part that's easy to overlook. In practice, a CA does not build the client's computation from the filed JSON. The computation is prepared independently — from the source documents, Form 26AS and the AIS, the client's records and your own working papers — as part of preparing the return in the first place. That independent computation is what you share with the client.
Which means there are effectively two documents that ought to agree, but are almost never checked against each other:
- Your own independently-prepared computation, and
- What was actually filed — which the JSON downloaded from the portal represents.
Most of the time they match. But a figure keyed wrongly into the utility, a schedule that didn't carry a last-minute revision, a value that shifted between your working and the final upload — any of these can leave the filed return quietly different from the computation you prepared, and nobody catches it. No one routinely generates a clean, readable summary from the filed JSON and lays it beside their own computation to confirm the two agree. The filed figures simply go unread in their raw form.
If you did want to read the filed return by hand to check it, the process is entirely mechanical: import the JSON in the official excel utility, locate each head of income within its section, pull the Chapter VI-A deductions, find the gross total income and the tax computation, total the taxes paid, and arrive at the refund or balance — navigating sheet by sheet. Done properly, that's 15–20 minutes of careful reading per return — which is exactly why almost no one does it, and why the filed figures usually go unverified against the computation.
The faster way: convert the filed JSON automatically
Reading the filed return by hand is mechanical, slow, and — because it takes 15–20 minutes a return — something almost no one actually does. So the mismatch between the filed figures and your own computation stays invisible. That's precisely the kind of gap worth closing automatically.
This is why we built SUM-IT. You download the ITR JSON from the e-filing portal exactly as you already do, drop it into the tool, and it returns a clean, professionally formatted Word summary of what was actually filed in a few seconds — every head of income, the deductions, the full tax computation, and the taxes paid, in a standard layout. It supports ITR-1, ITR-2, ITR-3 and ITR-4, and detects the form automatically.
That gives you two things at once. First, a readable record of the filed return. And second, a client-ready summary without the 15–20 minutes of manual formatting per return, which across a full client list adds up to days during the season.
Two things practising CAs tend to care about most: the output is an editable Word file, not a locked PDF — so you can add a note, adjust a figure, or drop in your firm's letterhead before sending it on. And the file is processed entirely in memory and never stored — nothing about your client's return is written to disk, saved, or retained after your report downloads.
See it on a real return
Download a free sample report to see exactly what the output looks like, then try it on your own ITR JSON — ₹400 for the full financial year, unlimited reports.
Open SUM-IT →Frequently asked questions
Where do I get the ITR JSON file?
Login → e-File → Income Tax Returns → View Filed Returns → Select the relevant Assessment Year → Download JSON. The JSON is the return data you download from the income tax e-filing portal after preparing or filing the return.
Which ITR forms are supported?
ITR-1, ITR-2, ITR-3 and ITR-4 for AY 2026-27. The correct form is detected automatically from the file, so you don't need to specify it.
Is my client's data safe?
Yes. The JSON is converted entirely in server memory and is never written to disk, saved to a database, or retained after the report is generated. The moment your Word file downloads, the source data is gone.
What does it cost?
₹400 for the entire financial year, with unlimited reports across all four forms, valid until 31 March. There's a free sample report on the site so you can see the output before deciding.