As the GST journey progressed since its introduction on 1 July 2017, it resulted in a year of wrangling and debate whether GST proved to be a game changer or game spoiler. It paved the way for a single national market by merging plethora of central and state taxes into a common, fungible tax making it transparent and easy to administer.
The progressive GST model relies on technology to help make the process secure, smarter and faster. For businesses, this translates into the electronic filing of multiple monthly state-wise returns, transaction-level data upload, numerous reconciliations (revenue reconciliation, reconciliation with vendor details uploaded on GSTN invoice matching) and, at times, complex tax computation.
However, undoubtedly the periodic compliances under the GST regime was something that did not go so well during the year. In this period, compliance-related experiences of the GST have not been smooth and the Government had a daunting task of updating various functionalities ever since the portal was made operational in July 2017.
Though some technical glitches have more or less been fixed, there are still various issues that remain unaddressed. Procedural relaxations (such as postponing of returns and vendor reconciliations) have provided short-term relief but the compliance challenges are here to stay keeping in view of the constant amendments in return formats being introduced now.
Given the above, businesses today require not only a robust tax technology solution for processing their GST returns but also a strong partner who can help them through this process. Foreseeing that technology is inevitable for managing compliances, as a leader in tax technology services, PwC has successfully developed and implemented GST Compliance Solution customized with state-of-the-art technology. The solution has been running effectively for over 650+ Companies, wherein more than 65,000 returns have been processed till date.