GST RETURNS

All registered dealers need to share their business information like sales, purchases, tax collected, tax paid and others on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) portal. This process is carried out by filing GST returns online on a periodic basis by using appropriate GST return forms.

What is GST Return?

A return is a document containing details of income which a taxpayer is required to file with the tax administrative authorities. This is used by tax authorities to calculate tax liability.

Under GST, a registered dealer has to file GST returns that include:

  • Purchases
  • Sales
  • Output GST (On sales)
  • Input tax credit (GST paid on purchases)

To file GST returns, GST compliant sales and purchase invoices are required. You can generate GST compliant invoices for free on ClearTax BillBook.

Who should file GST Returns?

In the GST regime, any regular business has to file two monthly returns and one annual return. This amounts to 26 returns in a year. The beauty of the system is that one has to manually enter details of one monthly return – GSTR-1. The other return GSTR 3B will get auto-populated by deriving information from GSTR-1 filed by you and your vendors. There are separate returns required to be filed by special cases such as composition dealers.

Monthly/Quarterly/Annual returns under GST law

Registered persons with an aggregate turnover up to Rs. 1.5 crore may opt for quarterly return filing. Registered persons with aggregate turnover of more than 1.5 crore must file a monthly return. Annual Return to be filed by eligible taxpayers. It gives a summarized report of transactions done during the financial year.

Reconciliation with books & GST returns

Reconciliation under GST although seems to be a simple process due to automation but still consumes lot of time and resources, as taxpayers are required to continuously communicate with vendors for making amendments in the returns filed by them or even to track. It would not tasking for businesses having a handful of transactions to monitor. However, in case you have thousands of invoices in a month, then even a single digit percentile will be a significant volume. Therefore, one must reconcile the returns data on regular basis under GST.