Terms for firms listing on OkCA

OkCA is subscription-first. A firm pays a fixed subscription for the platform, and OkCA takes no share of what the firm charges its own clients.

A commission arrangement — where OkCA collects the client's payment and retains a percentage before settling the rest to the firm — is available only to firms outside the ICAI Code of Ethics, and only by written agreement. It is never applied by default, and no firm is moved onto it without agreeing to it.

Required by Rule 5(4) of the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, which asks a marketplace to describe any differentiated treatment it gives or might give between sellers of the same category. OkCA gives or might give the following:

• Commercial terms are agreed per firm. The subscription a firm pays, and any commission rate where a commission arrangement applies, are recorded against that firm and can differ between firms. They are set by OkCA and not by any automatic rule.
• Commission is not available to every firm. A Chartered Accountant firm and a multidisciplinary firm cannot be charged a commission at all, because ICAI Code of Ethics Clause (2) treats a share, commission or brokerage in a member's fees as prohibited. Those firms are on a subscription. A firm that is not bound by that Code may be on either.
• Money flows differently under the two arrangements. On a subscription, the client pays the firm directly and OkCA is not in the payment path. Under a commission arrangement OkCA is, and the statutory deductions that follow from that — TCS under GST section 52 and TDS under Income-tax section 194-O — are withheld at settlement and reported in the firm's settlement statement.
• What a firm may list depends on what it is. Work that a statute reserves to Chartered Accountants can only be listed by a firm that may lawfully do it. This is a legal limit on the service, not a commercial preference, and it does not affect anything else about the listing.

Nothing above affects where a firm appears. The directory order is randomised on every visit, there is no paid placement, and OkCA does not rank, rate, recommend or compare firms. A firm's commercial terms have no bearing on its position, its visibility, or whether a client is shown it — which is why Rule 5(3)(f) on ranking parameters is not engaged. Every firm gets the same product: the same storefront, catalog, client portal, deadline engine and document tooling.

A firm states whether it is a Chartered Accountant firm, a multidisciplinary firm or a tax practice, and can correct that later. Because commission is not available to the first two, a firm on a commission arrangement cannot simply switch into one of them — the arrangement has to be ended first. OkCA will not silently drop a commercial term that was agreed, so that change is a conversation rather than a click.