02Who we look for
Credentialed, practised, and independent of the names you work on.
India alone has 452,825 chartered accountants (ICAI, April 2026). Labs is not looking for many of them. It is looking for the ones who have built models for a living, write clearly, and can be screened clean of the issuers they author.
credential
CA, CFA charterholder, or a track record that stands in for either.
Chartered accountants in or formerly in practice; CFA charterholders; former sell-side or buy-side analysts, FP&A and modelling specialists with three or more years of building and defending numbers. Say which, and for how long.
craft
You build in Excel, and you cite.
The tasks are the work: spreading a filing, updating an estimate model, tying figures across sources, finding what broke a thesis. You should be fast in Excel and in the habit of writing down where every number came from.
independence
Not currently covering, holding or advising on the issuers you author.
Screening before engagement and again per assignment; a cooling-off period from anything you covered; a signed attestation on every task that you brought no documents of your own. These rules protect the buyer from leakage and you from any question of it.
time
Blocks of four hours or more, on your own schedule.
Recorded sessions cannot be done in fragments. Authoring and review can. Most experts work a few assignments a month alongside other commitments; some work more. Both are fine.