'Industry not used to the pricing paradigm that is expected in GST ecosystem'

Sanjay Phadke, Business Head - GST Services, Vayana Network
 

GSTN envisages a very important role of GSPs in making GST rollout easy and convenient for tax payers. GSTN believes in creating an ecosystem of GST Suvidha Provider (GSP) providing innovative solutions (Portal, Mobile App, Enriched API) either themselves or through its third party partners for making tax filing more easy and convenient to tax payers.

Vayana Network stands for end to end GST Compliance. Services offered by us provide enterprises with the ability to proactively comply with GST regulations as well as ensure that their working capital is not impaired. Vayana Network ASP solutions and services can work of theGST processed input files to make them GST ready and help transit to and from GSTN. Apart from the usual tasks like tax preparation and return filing, our esteemed ASP partners provide add-on services including tax determination, validation, 500+ ERP connectors which integrates large number of billing systems and platforms like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, etc., private cloud instances, on premise ASP solutions, simple functionality using excel files, transition services and many more.

Vayana Network Invoice Reconciliation solution is an extremely simple collaborative and shared trade transaction tool which enables enterprises to confirm Input Tax Credit (ITC) and reduce Provisional Tax Credit (PTC). It reduces workload and errors in the GSTR filing time window by identifying issues throughout the month and ensures even the smallest of trade counterparties to be able to maintain and confirm invoice records.

The key challenges that we can foresee as a GSP in pan-India implementation of GST in the country are: Migration Challenges; Inability to comprehend pricing; and Technical readiness. Migration challenges to GST include: For service tax assesses, migration to GST will pose as a huge challenge; Multiple registrations is perceived as a pain factor for service sector companies (BFSI, Telecom, Media, etc.) having national footprint; Many are not aware about workflow and the timeline they have to adhere to. The awareness around rules and compliance process has still not reached grassroots; Supply chain for most of the corporates are not yet ready for GST adoption, especially SME suppliers and dealers; Majority of tax paying businesses are not geared up to the invoice reconciliation and input tax credit issues that they would be exposed to once GST rolls out; and there would be a lot of pressure on the chartered accountant community to manage their clients’ processes in a timely manner. They have to beef up their team by hiring more resources to manage large volumes of filing processes in limited time.

Industry is not used to the pricing paradigm that is expected in GST ecosystem. Here businesses have to pay a service provider an amount which linked to the volume of transactions, either number of invoices for ASP or API calls for GSP, which is a new concept. Tax payers believe that this is going to significantly increase their compliance cost. 

In technical readiness entire GST compliance process will be technology driven. However, industry at large is under prepared for the migration; GSTN, GSP and ASP ecosystem readiness with ISO audit certification, MPLS setup, application development, evolving APIs, lack of standardised technical documentation for developers poses a problem to provide complete solutions; and tax payers are forced to select their solutions based on some informed judgements. Selection of ASP and GSP is still under way for over 80-90% of the corporates. 

With the entire GST compliance process to be technology driven and industry at large being under prepared for the migration, our GST team has been extensively trained to ensure right knowledge and awareness is being imparted to the businesses regarding GSP services. For ASP services, our partners have competent teams to train the corporates with respect to GST so that there is smooth transition from July 1, 2017. 

We cater to the entire spectrum multinational, large, medium or small enterprises, application solutions providers, tax consultants or tax preparatory service providers since we understand their individual needs and can provide a solution which would be suitable for their business.