Successful business organizations have been observed to have developed a perfect balance in various production, purchase and procurement operations, quality control, human resources, sales and marketing, and accounting with finance.

From these, accounting and finance are any business enterprise’s essential yet most important functions. It organizes funds and manages the expenses, investments, and fixed costs, including salaries and infrastructure costs. Apart from these, it tracks the inflow of funds, asset management, business analysis, vendor analysis, and integrated resource management.

It often becomes challenging for businesspeople in managing this critical department effectively. Professional financial consulting companies play a crucial role in understanding, restructuring, organizing, simplifying, and streamlining accounting operations.

Prime Financial and Management Services, steered by Surbhi Singh Gaharwar, Founder and Business Management Consultant—is one prominent name in the business accounting services that has enhanced numerous business organizations in managing their financial structure effectively.

In the exclusive interview with the CIOLOOK India team, Surbhi provided valuable facts about her journey in professional accounting, the inspirations behind the business, the challenges tackled, and her vision for the company’s future.

Please brief our audience about Prime Financial and Management Services, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the Accounting and Tax consulting space.

Prime Financial and Management Services is an Advisory firm with expertise in Taxation, Project Financing, Business Management, and other financial and legal matters. We deal with all sorts of matters, starting with a pre-startup stage which involves preparing project reports, conducting viability studies, finding investors, preparing business plans, improvement plans, handholding clients in starting their business, onboarding vendors/ sellers/ employees, etc. to achieve profitability and further expansion of business we provide guidance at every step.

This is a one-stop solution to all business needs. We have clients from every field, from Start-ups to established corporations and from NGOs to investors.

What other products/solutions does Prime Financial and Management Services offer, and how are these making an impact on the Accounting and Tax consulting space and your clients?

Apart from Accounting and Taxation, Prime Financial and Management Services also provides services like Business Management Consulting, Project Consulting, Financial advisory, compliance and audit advisory, project viability studies, and related services.

We try to handhold our clients wherever required. Beginning from creating project reports to assisting in necessary registrations, arranging funds and investors, choosing the right talent by providing HR Consulting, ensuring all legal compliances, planning out marketing strategy, filing of returns/ challans and many more.

As for the impact on the accounting and consulting space, we try to create as many trained professionals as possible. We believe everyone is in a learning stage in this industry and try to create as much a learning atmosphere as possible.

We provide training to students/ graduates in the form of internships/courses etc., around the year. As an emerging advisory firm, we ensure that our interns/students also get rightfully paid according to their skills and contribution to the firm. As a business entity, we strongly believe in inclusive growth.

Surbhi, tell us about yourself and your journey in the Accounting-Tax consultancy industry and your contributions to the Prime Financial’s success.

I started my journey as a tax planner and then saw a market in this field as most people struggle to get their businesses running. Later I established this firm to accompany entrepreneurs in their journey. I started this firm while I was a student. Since then, we have been working in this field and gaining knowledge and experience in Taxation, Project Financing, Compliances, Audits, and more.

It’s an emerging firm currently, so we obviously are short-staffed almost all the time. However, as for the key persons running the firm- we have a full-time experienced consultant with us, Mr. D.K Singh, who has been in this industry for over two decades now. We have a few part-time and associate consultants, including CA, CS, and lawyers with a Pan India presence, who help us on a “need to” basis.

Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data, and machine learning had on the consultancy niche and what more could be expected in the future.

To say the least, technology has helped us leaps and bounds when it comes to consulting and advisory services. At our firm, we use all kinds of software which can help us ease our work. Technologies like Excel and Power BI have made our lives easier and have created a consultancy niche because of thriving competition in the market. However, at the end of the day, analysis of that data is in our hands. As consultants and advisors, we are supposed to put our brains into the data simplified by this software. Post this, mitigation and solution finding is something that takes learning, experience, and effort.

Considering the current scenario, what kind of challenges do you face, and how did you drive Prime Financial and Management Services by overcoming them?

One of the major challenges that I have faced is the dearth of talent here. Bhopal is not known to be very business friendly as such. Starting up a firm here has been a challenge economically as well as in terms of experience.

People here do not want to invest in training, learning, and quality. Which again is an issue. People must understand that these are investments and will have long-term gains at the end of the day. I aim to show the clients and the people here that quality and hard work matter at the end of the day.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial consultancy space?

My advice for budding aspirants is, “You can’t let your failures define you — you must let them teach you.”

How do you envision scaling Prime Financial’s operations and offerings in the future?

The first thing for any business to scale up is recurring clients, which we have already achieved quite a bit. Other than that, I am looking forward to adding a few experienced professionals to bring their valuable insight to the company. We are on the verge of expanding to Indore, Jabalpur, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai.