GST Return Filing Every Return, Every Due Date

For years the working assumption was simple: if you had a tax invoice from a supplier, you claimed the credit. That has not been true for a while, and the Invoice Management System has made the gap explicit. Every invoice your supplier reports now lands in your IMS dashboard, and you take a position on it: accept, reject, or keep pending. Your GSTR-2B, and therefore the credit available in your GSTR-3B, is built from those actions.

The dangerous part is what happens when you do nothing. An invoice left untouched is treated as accepted. That sounds convenient until a supplier reports an invoice you never received, or reports it at the wrong value, or reports a transaction that was later cancelled. Silence becomes a claim you did not intend to make, and reversing it later costs 24% annual interest on credit that was availed and utilised.

• Invoices reported by a supplier but never received by you have to be rejected, not ignored.
• Invoices where the value or tax rate is wrong should be kept pending while the supplier issues a credit note or amends.
• Credit notes need action too. An unaccepted credit note leaves your credit overstated.
• Where a supplier has simply not filed, chasing them before the 3B deadline is far cheaper than claiming and reversing.

A GST return that has not been filed within three years of its original due date can no longer be filed at all. The portal simply stops accepting it. This is not a fee, an extension, or something a good reply can fix afterwards. The window closes and stays closed.

That changes the calculation on old pending periods. A business that quietly stopped filing during a difficult year, or that has an inactive GSTIN nobody has looked at, may be sitting on returns that are close to being permanently barred. And a barred return does not remove the liability. It removes your ability to report it, while the department retains its ability to assess you on it, usually on a best-judgement basis under Section 62 that will not be generous.

If you have unfiled periods, the sequence matters. GST returns are filed in order, so an old gap blocks everything after it. Clearing the backlog from the oldest period forward is usually the fastest way back to a clean GSTIN, and it is work we do routinely.

A registration with no sales still has returns due. Nil GSTR-1 and nil GSTR-3B are mandatory for every period the GSTIN is active, and the late fee for skipping them is ₹20 a day per return. Two years of ignoring a dormant registration turns into a real number, and it has to be cleared before any fresh return can be filed.

There is a second cost that catches people out. Non-filing across consecutive periods gives the department grounds to suspend and then cancel the registration. Cancellation is not a quiet exit either. It triggers GSTR-10, the final return, due within three months, and it can bring reversal of input tax credit on stock held on the cancellation date.

If a GSTIN genuinely has no future use, surrendering it properly is much cheaper than letting it lapse. If it does have future use, filing nil returns takes minutes and can be done by SMS. Either decision beats doing nothing.

Every one of these is preventable at the point of filing. The reconciliation that takes an hour before submission is the same reconciliation you will otherwise do under a deadline, with a penalty attached, months later when the details are harder to reconstruct.

Selling through Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho, Zomato, Swiggy or a quick-commerce platform adds a layer that ordinary retail filing does not have. The operator collects TCS on your behalf and reports it in GSTR-8. That credit shows up in your electronic cash ledger, and it has to be matched against what you report as outward supply. Sellers routinely under-claim it simply because nobody reconciles the payout statements against the returns.

The other recurring problem is the shape of the data. Marketplace settlement reports mix gross sales, returns, commission, shipping, and platform fees into a single payout line. Reporting the payout as turnover is wrong in both directions: it understates your outward supply and it hides the input credit available on the commission the platform charged you.

We work off the settlement and tax reports the platforms generate rather than the bank credit, split the components properly, claim credit on platform charges, and reconcile TCS to the last rupee.

• Sales are reported at gross invoice value, not at the net amount that reached your bank.
• Platform commission, fulfilment charges and advertising spend carry GST you can claim.
• Returns and cancellations need credit notes in the right period, or turnover stays inflated.
• Multi-state warehousing under a fulfilment programme usually needs registration in each state you hold stock in.

Exports are zero-rated, but zero-rated is not the same as exempt, and the paperwork is where refunds are won or lost. With a valid Letter of Undertaking you export without paying IGST and claim a refund of accumulated input credit. Without one, you pay IGST on the export and claim that back instead. Either way the export has to be reported in the right table of GSTR-1, with shipping bill details that match what customs holds.

The most common reason a refund sits unpaid is a mismatch between GSTR-1 and the shipping bill: a wrong port code, an invoice value that does not agree, or a shipping bill number entered against the wrong invoice. The refund system matches these automatically, and a single mismatched field is enough to stall the claim without any notice being issued to tell you why.

Service exporters have a different trap. Payment has to be received in convertible foreign exchange, and the FIRC or bank realisation certificate is what proves the supply qualifies as an export rather than a domestic taxable supply. We check that the LUT is current, that the invoice and shipping bill agree, and that the export is reported in the table that lets the refund flow.

You do not need to wait for a financial year to start. Most of our clients move mid-year, often after a missed deadline or a notice that nobody could explain. The handover takes one working week and starts with an audit rather than with filing.

We pull your filing history from the portal, look at the last six periods, and check three things: whether every return was actually filed, whether GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B agree on liability, and whether the credit claimed in 3B was supported by 2B. That gives you a written picture of what you inherited, including anything that will surface later in GSTR-9. If there are gaps, we tell you what it will take to clear them before we quote for ongoing work.

Nothing here requires you to hand over passwords in a chat. We use the authorised signatory route where possible and agree the access arrangement in writing before onboarding.