GSP: GST Suvidha Provider

[Ganeshan Kalyani]

In GST a taxpayer has to furnish invoice wise details of outward supply made to registered person, unregistered person where the invoice value is more than 2.5 lacs, zero rated supplies and deemed supplies, supplies to unregistered person where the invoice value is up to 2.5 lacs, nil-exempt and non-GST supplies, amendments to supply shown earlier, advance received, HSN summary, count of documents issued etc. The said information is required to be filed in GSTR-1. Taxpayer is also required to file Form ITC-04 where the taxpayer is required to furnish the details of goods sent to job worker and received back from them. In addition to this there are other returns as well.

Each of the aforesaid type of supplies are required to be furnished in respective tables of the GSTR-1 return. It would be very difficult for the taxpayer to prepare the return in a very short time. The due date of GSTR-1 filing is 11th of succeeding month. There is a challenge in filing the return in the GST portal within due date if the return is preparing manually.

The taxpayer is also required to match his input tax credit with the supplies uploaded by their suppler. This is again a challenge to the taxpayers to do it manually. Thus, in order to comfort the taxpayers from the complex compliance, the government has come up with a concept called GST Suvidha Provider.

The role of the GSP is to develop applications that has features like return filing, reconciliation of purchase register data with auto populated data for acceptance/rejection/modification, dashboards for taxpayers for quick monitoring of GST compliance activities. They may also provide role based access to divide various GST related activities like uploading invoice, filing returns etc., among different set of users inside a company (medium or large companies), Applications for Tax Professional to manage their client’s GST compliance activities, Integration of existing accounting packages/ERP with GST System, etc.

In the year 2017, 34 GSPs were selected by the Government. Thereafter in the year 2018, 39 GSPs were selected including 3 Government agencies.

The taxpayer can opt for the service of GSP. Taxpayer can also comply directly from GST website. However, compliance through GSP would eliminate the difficulties that may arise while uploading the return in the GST website. GSPs are given special rights by the government to communicate with the GST website to file the return.

GSP also provide the service for e-way bill generation. GSP has APIs of e-way bill received from government with which it generate e-way bill in fraction of seconds. The GSP has tools which is integrated with accounting system. Once, the invoice is generated for outward supply the tool pulls the invoice information from the accounting system and shows it in the web portal of GSP. The user can either check them once and then proceed to generate e-way bill or do total integration. Total integration enables the data from accounting software to flow to GSP web portal and from there to e-way bill website and then e-way bill is generated.

The need for GSP's service is increasing with the complexity in compliance. Further, the introduction of new return in couple of months ahead has increased the importance of GSP.