Consulting and Professional Services

Context

The firm has offices in Gurugram, Mumbai and Bengaluru, each with its own GSTIN, and about 1,800 consultants who travel to client sites most weeks. Travel is booked through one corporate agency and an online tool. The tax team reviewed airline credit once a year, in the weeks before the 30 November deadline.

The Challenge

The yearly review always found the same problems: tickets booked without a GSTIN, invoices issued to the wrong office, and credit notes for cancelled trips that nobody had matched. By October, many of those tickets were eleven months old and airlines were slow to correct them.

Because nothing was fixed until year end, the same booking errors repeated every month. About 11 per cent of tickets had a fixable problem, and roughly half of those were never resolved in time.

What We Did

We took one catch-up pass over the open months of the year, then moved to a monthly cycle: invoices pulled from airline portals in the first week, matched to GSTR-2B when it arrived, and claimed before GSTR-3B.

The first month’s exceptions list showed that most missing GSTINs came from one booking channel. The travel desk made the GSTIN field mandatory there, and the error rate fell within two months.

The Outcome

The firm claimed ₹1.3 crore of airline credit in its first year on monthly reconciliation, most of it in the month the tickets were flown rather than in one late block.

Tickets with a fixable problem fell from about 11 per cent to around 2 per cent. The October scramble is gone: by the time the deadline approaches, there is little left to clean up.

Timeline

1. Month 1Catch-up match for open months, first exceptions list
2. Month 2Booking channel fixed at the travel desk
3. Month 3Error rate below 4 per cent; credit claimed monthly
4. Every monthSigned statement and a 30-minute call