UDIN Register for CA Firms: Stop Tracking UDINs in Excel
Ask a partner how many UDINs the firm generated last month and you will usually get a shrug, then a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will be a month behind, it will be maintained by whoever remembers, and it will not agree with the ICAI portal. None of that matters until the day someone asks you to produce it — a client, a bank, a reviewer, or the Institute — and then it matters a great deal.
This is not a post about what UDIN is. It is a post about the register behind it, which is the part firms actually get wrong.
What is UDIN?
A Unique Document Identification Number is an 18-digit number generated on the ICAI's own portal at udin.icai.org for documents certified or attested by a full-time practising Chartered Accountant. The first two digits are the last two of the year, the next six are the member's ICAI membership number, and the last ten are generated at random by the portal.
It came in by stages: certificates from 1 February 2019, GST and tax audit reports from 1 April 2019, and all other attest functions from 1 July 2019. The Institute expects the number to be generated when the document is signed, but in line with SQC-1 and SA 230 it may be generated within 60 days of signing. The portal will not let you backdate.
That 60-day window is where the register earns its keep, because it turns a signature into an open item with a deadline attached — and open items with deadlines are exactly what firms lose track of.
5 problems with keeping UDINs in Excel
It lives somewhere the work does not. The audit report sits in a job folder, the UDIN sits in a workbook on a partner's desktop, and the only thing joining them is somebody's memory. Six months later nobody can go from the document to the number, or from the number back to the document, without asking the person who signed it.
Nothing tells you what is still pending. A register records what was done. It does not surface the report signed eleven days ago whose number has not been generated yet. By the time anyone notices, the window has usually closed on at least one of them.
The 60 days is counted from memory. Every signed document carries its own separate clock, starting on its own date. That is a scheduling problem, and a spreadsheet is not a scheduler.
Attribution goes soft. A UDIN is generated under a specific member's own login and carries that member's membership number in its own digits. In a firm with three or four signing partners, a shared workbook stops making it obvious whose number went onto which engagement — which is precisely the question anyone reviewing it will ask.
Revocation goes unrecorded. A UDIN can be revoked, with a reason, and anyone verifying it afterwards will see that it was revoked. If your register does not carry that flag, it is quietly telling you the wrong thing about a document you have already issued.
What a UDIN register should contain
Whether you keep it in software or on paper, a register that survives a question needs all of this on one row, per document:
- 1. The client, and the engagement the document belongs to.
- 2. What the document is — certificate, tax audit report, GST audit, other attest function.
- 3. The date it was signed, which is the date the 60 days runs from.
- 4. The signing member, and their membership number.
- 5. The UDIN itself, and the date it was generated.
- 6. Whether it has since been revoked, and why.
- 7. Where the signed document is filed, so the row leads back to the paper.
Read that list again and notice what it really is: a register of signed work. The UDIN is one column of it. Firms that treat it as a UDIN problem end up with a UDIN spreadsheet. Firms that treat it as a work problem already have somewhere to put it.
Record the UDIN in the task, not in Excel
The fix is unglamorous. The UDIN belongs on the task the document came out of — the same record that already knows the client, the engagement, who did the work, who reviewed it and when it was signed. Then the register is not something anyone maintains. It is a report.
That is how MyTask handles it: signing details, the filing acknowledgement number and the UDIN are recorded against the task itself in Work, Staff & Office Management, so the firm-wide register is a view over work that has already been logged rather than a second book somebody has to keep. Signed documents going back to the client are tracked in Inward & Outward Document Management, so the row leads to the paper.
None of that removes the professional judgement or the 60-day window. It removes the thing firms actually get caught by, which is not knowing.
UDIN requirements are set by the ICAI and do change. Confirm the current position at udin.icai.org before relying on any of the dates above.