| |September 20178CIOReviewhe mind of any CFO or CIO to-day in India is completely occu-pied by the biggest tax reform so far of the country ­the Goods and Services Tax (GST). The introduc-tion of GST is expected to have a T By V. Balasundaram, Director (Finance) and Board Member, Frost & Sullivan (India)Business Process Improvements in a GST ScenarioIN MY OPINIONBalasundaram has 25 years of experience in Finance. He is Chartered Accountant, Cost Accountant and an alumnus of Columbia Business School, New York. Currently, he works as Director (Finance) and Board Member of Frost & Sullivan India. profound impact on the business process management of all companies. This is because a perusal of the GST requirements reveals that the provisions require elaborate reporting to the government. While an elaborate reporting takes its time and efforts, it appears that it has also opened up possibilities of an increase in business process efficiency of all companies. The main report under GST is GSTR-1, which gives the details of sales invoices of a company for any particular month. Every company registered under GST has to report to the government invoice-wise details of taxable value and the tax amount, among other things. The requirement to give de-tails document-wise increases the amount of data transmitted to the government manifold. Another important return that needs to be submitted is GSTR-2, which gives details of in-voices from vendors. Here again, the company has to give the details invoice-wise, and hence the amount of data to be submitted is huge. However, the company need not prepare GSTR-2 from scratch. The government would present the company with a Draft GSTR-2, styled as GSTR-2A. This is possible since GSTR-2 is a return of purchase invoices, which are nothing but sales invoices of others who would report all details invoice-wise in their GSTR-1. The company needs to basically review GSTR-2A and modify it to rectify any mis-takes and finalize it as GSTR-2. Since the company would essentially be presented with GSTR-2A with almost all data culled from various reports of vendors, the task of submitting GSTR-2 is not expected to be big.This situation presents us with some interesting possibilities, in terms of business process man-V. Balasundaram
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