Casual and seasonal traders like those selling goods in Dilli Haat can now register on GSTN

Customers stand under lanterns for sale as they look at them at a roadside market ahead of the Hindu festival of Diwali in Mumbai, India, October 23, 2016. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui - RTX2Q396

Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), the IT backbone of India’s new indirect tax system has opened registration for casual or seasonal taxpayers from today, a move that will enable bringing more traders into the formal economy.

“We have started registration of non-resident and casual taxpayers from today. A casual taxpayer is a person who does not do business throughout the year,” Chairman of GSTN, Navin Kumar told Moneycontrol.

For example, someone who comes to Dilli Haat to sell products for only a few months or someone from Romania selling leather products in India, can now register themselves at the GSTN portal, Kumar explained.

GST, which promises to stitch a common national market by subsuming a web of local and central taxes into a single levy, was rolled out from July 1. GSTN, a special purpose vehicle portal has been set up to enable real-time taxpayer registration, filing returns, handle invoices, and connect states for two-way data flow.

GSTN has also made provision for making amendments in registration process from today.

“Many people said that we had filled up information. But there is a mistake we need to correct it. We have acquired a new place, I need to update that information. Bank account needs to change. This provision for amendments was not there. These functionalities has started from today,” Kumar said.

The industries can start uploading their sale and purchase invoices generated after July 1 on GSTN portal from Monday. In addition, a trial for the exercise will be carried out for next one week starting today.

“The service that we are starting is uploading of invoices and viewing by the seller and purchaser. These services will be started from July 24,” Kumar said.

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GSTN plans to come up with an offline utility starting Monday for taxpayers involved in business-to-business (B2B) transactions. The facility will suit businesses, especially small players as they generate few invoices, and it will certainly reduce their load at the time of filing returns as all the data would have been fed into the portal in advance, which will also avoid last minute rush.

“We are providing this offline utility, which is a java based utility and it has an excel sheet linked to it. In the excel sheet, you can keep entering you invoices and then that utility uploads data from that sheet into our portal. The offline utility will be releasing on July 24 from which we will start the facility of uploading of invoices,” Kumar explained.

The trial exercise would be available to a closed user group of tax officers, tax payers.

“Our basic is purpose for them is to see how these tools can be used and how they can upload the invoice data. Also, who are these people who would be required to upload? So the big business, who generate large number of invoices we want to see how they can do it,” he said.

He further said taxpayers, particularly those who have large number of invoices in a month, should not wait until the last day for uploading the invoices.

“Similarly, the big businesses, which generate lakhs of invoices, they should do it every night. At the end of the day they should upload their invoices. Our system provides facility of upload 24x7. Best time for them would be at night,” Kumar said.