by Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO, Clear
Technology saves you the time and effort spent on routine activities and accomplishing complicated tasks. Compliance under dynamic and progressive laws such as Goods and Services Tax (GST) needs your team’s attention.
Complexities in manual GST compliance
GST has many compliances to cater to, ranging from return filing to refund applications. Certain tasks are not written in rule books involving crucial reconciliation and constant vendor communication.
A typical enterprise must file many returns every financial year. It becomes excruciating and time-consuming if a small team handles the GST filing of all GSTINs for the organization. On the other hand, if a larger team puts much of its bandwidth during the month into the GST data matching, then it seems their leader never factored in the cost of compliance. Many large enterprises have been flooded with GST notices from the department since the inception of the GST law. Upon checking the root cause, it ultimately pointed towards errors caused due to high manual intervention.
With the provisional Input Tax Credit (ITC) rule removed, taxpayers suffered ITC losses due to non-compliant vendors. It involved follow-ups and data tracking for enterprises. These actions must be carried out in real-time and become unavoidable. We helped many taxpayers through our Clear GST solution, a cloud-based solution, by automation of redundant tasks.
Leveraging technology for end-to-end GST compliance
It’s time that every organization must leverage technology and automation to simplify its compliance and ensure accuracy in reporting. It not only saves time but also enables tax optimisation for enterprises.
We provide an end-to-end filing solution or integrated GST filing through Clear GST. A user need not leave the software anytime while filing the return, including for vendor communication.
Many have bid goodbye to conventional spreadsheets and manual data entries! With our solution, users need not separately upload data on the government portal to validate data entered in the return. Our ability to integrate with multiple ERPs is another differentiator for us. Large organizations tend to have multiple ERPs, storing data in different formats, further increasing the need for manual data massaging.
Else, they can also use connectors or templates with custom mappers. We also have several smart error validations to identify errors on a simple user interface. These are built into the software at every stage of preparation and filing.
Scalability is the key to smooth compliance
No scale has been ever big for us as our Clear GST solution seamlessly pulls historical return data across GSTINs of the organization from the government portal. Returns include GSTR-2A, GSTR-2B, GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B. Moreover, users can do this with a click of a button across financial years!
Custom rules and bulk actions for seamless GST compliance
Our Clear GST platform performs advanced reconciliations between GSTR-2A or GSTR-2B, GSTR-3B and books/general ledger allowing users to define logic for suggested matches. Users can accept, reject, and match suggestions while linking or de-linking a pair of invoices within the software. One can sort invoices at the vendor level and send email or WhatsApp communications from within the software in bulk. Most recently, ITC must be bifurcated as eligible and ineligible for reporting it in Table 4 of GSTR-3B, as appearing in the GSTR-2B. We enabled the auto-population of Table 4 based on GSTR-2B versus purchase to register reconciliation as per the latest GST changes.
The advanced user management feature in Clear GST allows teams to collaborate and be assigned specific roles in return filing and other GST compliances. Auditors can get special access to up to 8-year audit trails as well.
Solving by adopting a problem-centric approach
We have provided an exclusive MaxITC solution to allow the onboarding of vendors and blocking payment of GST component of purchase invoices from within the software to optimize tax outflows. There is no need for separate analysis, but the software does that for you with its insightful reports ready for use by business leaders. The software allows easy documentation and a detailed calculation trail available at a click of a button to help businesses respond to any potential notices
Hence, the Clear solution continues to support and fulfill the end-to-end GST filing needs of Indian enterprises amid evolving rules and systems.
