SPEAKER NOTES FOR CA EVENT

The premise of this presentation are as follows:

  • Session is multi-speaker with limited timeslot session
  • Tax professional will talk about the Law part of GST
  • There could be other speaker who will talk of their technology or solution
  • Tally’s time slot is 30-45 Mts (proposed, as we will not be the first speaker, any delay in start of the event or timeslot extension by previous speaker, could put us with the risk of less than allotted time)
  • We have 11 slides of talking points, on an average 3 Mts will give us clean – 33Mts

Tally’s messaging and value proposition is:

Core message – CA play a very important role in ensuring the success GST implementation for their client and the Country. The other pillar of success of GST will be ‘Technology’ which is the backbone infrastructure of transaction based compliance management.

Tally be CA’s technology partner in their journey of successful implementation of GST, with an implicit message of our success is determined by their success.

  • GST being a revolution in tax reforms, - we are highlighting on the Impact of GST on businesses and the CA themselves.
  • Highlight on preparedness of CA’s client and their preparedness to ensure seamless transition and complete compliance under GST.
  • Key role of the technology under GST compliance
  • Preparedness of their clients today for the upcoming change – by highlighting our current technology greatly assisting them for transition.
  • Importance of CA’s role and linking our technology success to their success.

Slide – 2:

Business Process:

Your Professional advice is going to be very critical for your clients towards re-visiting their business structure and process. Eg: Under the current regime, for the purpose of VAT credit to the businesses, your clients having multiple location, may have to take business decision on various branch in states. Under GST since ITC will be seamlessly flowing across the supply chain for all intra and interstate supply of goods, as GST being ‘One Tax, One Nation and One Market’.

Similarly, for your firm also, some of you may have to revisit on your firm structure and processes as under GST all the indirect taxes are going to be subsumed under one tax umbrella. As most of you have clients either for VAT or Service Tax and maybe very less clients of Excise.

Organizational Competency / Consultancy:

Your clients need to understand the fundamentals of GST compliance and other operational aspects related to complete compliance, you will play a key role in guiding the client to build the competencies of their people in knowing the Law. Or

The clients will depend completely on your professional acumen in guiding them for proper compliance to the law and adhering to the compliance requirements.

Transitioning:

What are the preparedness and disciplines required by the client with their financial and compliance data such that they are able to smoothly transition to GST. Eg: ensuring that the Input Credit claimed in the last return can be substantiated with the books of account, claiming of Input credit on the stocks held on the last day of the appointed date, where the registered dealer is was not liable to be registered under the earlier law and was eligible for cenvat credit on receipt of such inputs. Goods were exempted under the earlier law but are taxable under GST.

Compliance:

Educating and preparing the clients to the requirements of Input Tax Eligibility and the process of filing returns under GST in phased manner for each type of supply outward and inward for the return period.

Assessing the current compliance methodologies and tool are adequate or need to be upgraded or adopt a new technology to ensure the compliance are met as prescribed with greater efficiency and effectiveness, the GST compliance is ‘Transaction based compliance driven by technology’.

Credibility:

This is an important area where your guidance is critical to your clients, especially, small business on understanding the criticality of adherence to timelines. The implications of non-adherence, firstly is going to put their businesses at risk of low credit rating and also a major dent in the cash flow for the businesses.

Eg: Non-filing and discharge of liability on time, may lead to, they losing the benefit of Input tax credit and vice versa their inward supplies, if the tax liability by his/her selling dealer not discharging the liability on time, may lead to ineligibility of Input Tax Credit on their inward supply.

The select of their supplier based on good credit rating and demonstrating their healthy credibility will not have negative impact on their business growth and cash flow.

Slide No – 3

Self-explanatory, the point to be stressed here is, changing habit is difficult by nature for human kinds, and it requires time and practice to make required changes over a period of time. Hence, to start acting on the required changes in their operations, recording and maintaining of books of account or compliance record are being actioned upon as per the new law requirements.

Slide No – 4

Self-explanatory, the point to be stressed here is, why the CA will play a critical or key role in educating and preparing the client for compliance under GST Law. Importantly, how they can prepare their client well in advance in choosing the right technology to be adopted by the client, such that, the clients business activities are not bottlenecked due to compliance nitty-gritty for GST compliance, avoid repetition and reproduction of extracting the base compliance information.

This exercise will also greatly assist the CA’s in reducing time and effort in ensuring of their client and will bring greater efficiency and effectiveness in their profession, which will give greater scope for expansion of their profession by catering the more and more clients.

Slide No – 5

Technology is the key:

Highlighting on the importance and major change from the existing compliance law, which is going to be transaction based with matching concept by the dealers, which a first time in the history of Indian compliance history.

With the introduction of GST and technology playing a major role, a true Business to Government to Business handshake is going to emerge.

How the technology will drive triangulation of dealers records with related transactions of other dealers. Eg: matching the dealers books of account and ensuring 100% of their compliance record are matching to the return they are submitting and matching and reconciling with the ‘auto populated’ transactions as provided through GSTN to our books.

Slide No – 6

In this slide, need to provide a vision of how technology need to help the user in ensuring, detection, correction and compliance at each stage of the lifecycle of compliance records.

Slide No- 7

In this slide, shortly discuss the highlight of for the first time Government is providing API (Application Program Interface) links for software developers to seamlessly interface with the GSTN server. Which will be a gamechanger in the world of technology. These links will allow software to exchange data between the dealer’s data to GSTN server.

This will ease, the complexity of compliance of return filing and matching transactions.

Slide No – 8

The GST System is going to have a G2B portal for taxpayers to access the GST Systems, however, that would not be the only way for interacting with the GST system. GST system architecture is an API based platform and therefore taxpayer via his choice of third party applications, which will provide all user interfaces and convenience via desktop, mobile, other interfaces, will be able to interact with the GST system. The third party applications will connect to GST system via secure GST System APIs. All the functionalities of GST portal will be available through APIs. All such applications are expected to be developed by third party service providers who have been given a generic name, GST Suvidha Provider (GSP).

The GSPs are envisaged to provide innovative and convenient methods to taxpayers and other stakeholders in interacting with the GST Systems from registration of entity to uploading of invoice details to filing of returns. Thus there will be two sets of interactions, one between the App user and the GSP and the second between the GSP and the GST System.

GSTN will be the overall regulator and overseer of the API based system whereas, Infosys, the managed service provider (MSP) selected by GSTN to create GST Systems, will set up the requisite process enrolment, establishment of secure connectivity and assisting GSPs in smooth integration of APIs along with running operations of GSPs on behalf of GSTN.

Tally is working with the formalities of enrolling as GSP. The advantage of Tally being a GSP and ASP (Application software provider) is a great combination and would provide never before software experience for Tally users.

Slide No – 10 & 11

In this slide, we will have to relate to the preparedness of businesses for GST in form of:

  1. Capturing all compliance entries with appropriate data, ensuring that their books of accounts are 100% matching the return filed.
  2. Triangulation or reconciliation of all the compliance records are being captured as per the requirement of the returns.
  3. System assisted exceptions and quick correction of data.
  4. Without an addition action on the data, to port the data to the required return template.
  5. Saving of returns for future reference, in case of query, clarification through any notices being served on the dealer.

With the above, as setting the stage for bringing changes in the process of their capturing of compliance transactions, will allow the dealer to practice and prepare for the upcoming compliance.

Now, we will have to highlight that how latest release of Tally.ERP 9 Release 5.4, is being designed to help the dealers to capture their compliance data, in a structured manner, quickly allow the user to detect and correct the data, in case of any exception or missing elements.

Currently, people who are using Tally, for compliance, are aware, that with click of a button, how the triangulated data from Tally gets exported into the relevant templates provided by VAT/Service Tax and Excise statute.

Once, the finalization of the law and freezing of the GST return formats, Tally needs to pull the same data in the GST formats.

Just to revisit Tally’s technology fabric, need to highlight on these areas below, to draw the attention of the audience, Tally’s base technology, which has been there for years, can be demonstrated for the current compliance requirement.

  1. The inventory module – how Tally, can help the user to substantiate the claim of input tax credit of stock.
  2. With the new matching concept of outward and inward supply, to be carried out by every registered dealer under GST. Just to illustrate the technology capability of current Tally, we will give the concept of ‘Auto bank reconciliation’ – where the dealers bank transactions as per the books of Banks are downloaded in excel or any other format from the banks portal. Then, the same is imported into Tally to reconcile the bank transactions in their books, by click of a button.
    Tally will auto reconcile the data and provide details of missing entries from either side, and also Tally allows to convert them into voucher instantaneously.

Slide No – 12

In this slide the core messaging need to be captured: CA play a very important role in ensuring the success of GST implementation for their client and the Country. The other pillar of success of GST will be ‘Technology’ which is the backbone infrastructure of transaction based compliance management.

Tally be CA’s technology partner in their journey of successful implementation of GST, with an implicit message of our success is determined by their success.