Key Takeaways
- Compliance protects a company from penalties. Claiming brings back credit it has already paid for. They are different jobs.
- Most finance teams are built and measured for compliance, so airline credit gets claimed late, partly, or not at all.
- Claiming needs its own owner, its own rhythm and one clear measure: credit claimed against credit available.
Ask a CFO whether their company is on top of its GST, and the answer is usually yes. Returns go in on time. Notices get answered. The auditors are satisfied. By every standard the finance function is measured on, the job is done.
Now ask a different question: how much GST did the company pay on air tickets last year, and how much of it did it claim? That answer is usually a pause.
The gap between those two answers isn’t a failure of competence. It’s a failure of design. Most finance functions are built for compliance. Very few are built to claim.
Two Jobs That Look Like One
From the outside, compliance and claiming look like the same work. Both involve invoices, returns and reconciliations. Both sit with the tax team. But they point in opposite directions. Compliance asks: have we paid and reported everything we must? Claiming asks: have we taken back everything we’re owed?
A company can be fully compliant and still leave crores of airline credit unclaimed. Nothing in a compliance review will flag it.
Compliance and Claiming Are Different Jobs
| Compliance | Claiming airline credit | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | Have we paid and reported everything? | Have we claimed everything we’re owed? |
| Risk it manages | Paying too little, and the penalties that follow | Paying too much, and never noticing |
| What drives it | Statutory due dates | A 30 November limit that passes quietly |
| Who acts | Mostly the company itself | Airlines, travel desks and agencies |
| How it’s measured | Returns filed on time, no notices | Credit claimed against credit available |
Source: TraCarta.
Why Airline Credit Falls Through the Cracks
It depends on other people. Airline credit needs the traveller to quote the right GSTIN, the agency to book it correctly and the airline to issue and report the invoice. Compliance is largely in the company’s control; claiming mostly isn’t.
It’s made of many small amounts. No single missing airline invoice is worth a meeting. Together they add up to real money, but nobody sees the total unless someone adds it up.
The deadlines are loud and the losses are silent. So compliance always wins the calendar.Ashish Kumar, Managing Partner
Nobody is measured on it. A tax team is rewarded for a clean audit, not for the credit it claimed. When something isn’t measured, it gets done when there’s time. There’s rarely time.
What Changes When It Has an Owner
- An ownerOne person or one firm accountable for airline credit claimed, inside the team or outside it.
- A rhythmMonthly, not yearly. Credit claimed in the right period, and gaps chased while the airline can still correct them.
- A numberCredit claimed against credit available, reported every month alongside what’s pending and what’s at risk.
Where Technology Fits
Claiming airline credit used to be too expensive to do properly because it meant checking every ticket by hand. That has changed. Systems can now collect invoices from airline portals, match them to GSTR-2B and your books, and flag every gap with its value. What’s left for people is the part that needs judgment: eligibility, audits and decisions.
That’s the model we’ve built TraCarta around. But the principle holds whoever does the work: if nobody owns claiming the credit, it isn’t claimed.
Sources
- TraCarta analysis
General information only, not tax advice. Check the current law and your facts before acting.
