Mr. Sudhir K. Singh
CEO & Co-Founder GSTStreet & TaxStreets
As we are aware of our evolution of Indian Indirect Tax starting from Excise Duty, Customs Duty, Sales Tax, VAT, Service Tax wherein, an industry/ organization were having different specialized professions/ people being allocated with different Indirect Tax compliances task firstly in the form of making an entry in the books of account with the help of accounting package which were further different based on the size of company and secondly, statutory requirements of filing returns mostly manually using excel knowledge.
As any other hereditary problem, the filing of returns is still done manually by most of the people in an excel sheet with every advancement, which was incorporated year on year to cope up with the same without any hardships. Also, the main reason for doing it manually was, one there were less number of software to help them to automate their work and secondly as the concerned person in the company were individually responsible for filing the return and payment of tax without any dependency about the filing details of their vendors and suppliers as there were smooth flow of credit without dependency on anyone i.e. If you are filing return and paying tax you would get credit for taxes paid without any hurdle.
Another perspective to look at non-adoption of Software on a big scale is the lack of trust in being able to transmit the data securely to government portals as day by day data is proving to be the modern oil based on which people are minting loads of money. Cyber security has become the talk to of town with best of the best cyber security providers claiming to protect at the max 84% of the all possible hacking attempts, any compromise on the return data can prove to be disastrous to the concerned business. Software providers (ASPs/GSPs) need to work harder on gaining the trust as failure to comply anyway directly impact business success. A taxpayer should consider creating an evaluation criteria to select the right technology vendor. Factors such as intuitiveness of reconciliation, validation and tax determination engine, data security, storage and privacy policies, business continuity and disaster recovery plan, among other things, should be considered. Sector wise expertise of any ASP/GSP should also be considered. With eway bill already a reality, maturity level of Software to be able to handle eway bill should be one of the most important automation consideration for software selection. Features like Generating e-way bills by SMS, Cancellation of e-way bill within 24 hours if the goods not transported as per details furnished, Verifying documents and inspecting goods, be able to check the validity of e-way bill must be taken into account.
GSTStreet ecosystem is uniquely poised to help identify the right Software by its advisory services from best of the best experts contributing to that decision making. Our Key Services are in the areas of Outreach planning, ERP Advisory, Feet on the Street research and complex project execution by leveraging power of shared economy of 400+ experts world-wide working with 42 Industry associations in 12+ languages. Our strong focus is on understanding the gap points and bridge them by recommending best possible solution and get it implemented as well.
Compiled by GSTstreet for #GSTManthan
