Pharma and Life Sciences
Large field forces book their own travel, often from small towns, on corporate cards or through regional agents.
Where Airline Credit Usually Leaks
The patterns we see most often in Pharma and Life Sciences. Your company’s picture will differ; the review shows by how much.
What We Do First
Most relevant service: Airline GST Reconciliation
- Link each traveller to their home-state GSTIN using HR data
- Find self-booked tickets with no GSTIN
- Ask airlines to correct invoices before 30 November
Case Study
Airline GST Reconciliation · Pharma company · 3,500-strong field force
Finding Credit Booked to the Wrong State
Context
The company sells branded formulations through a field force of about 3,500 medical representatives and managers, spread over 18 states. It holds a GSTIN in each state where it has a depot or office. Field staff booked their own flights on corporate cards or through a regional agent, entering the GSTIN they remembered or the one the booking site suggested. Finance saw the resulting airline GST as an unrecoverable part of the field travel budget.
The Challenge
Over two financial years the field force took about 31,000 flights. When we sampled them, nearly half carried a GSTIN from a different state to the one where the traveller was based, and a further group had no GSTIN at all. The airline had charged IGST or CGST and SGST correctly for the journey, but the invoice was addressed to the wrong registration.
Credit on these invoices landed in the GSTR-2B of a state unit that had no link to the expense, and the unit that bore the cost saw nothing. Leaving credit where it landed carried audit risk, and the earlier year was close to its Section 16(4) limit, so the corrections had to be completed quickly.
What We Did
Our systems pulled every invoice from the airline portals and linked each ticket to the traveller's home state using HR records. Each ticket was tagged as correct, wrong state or missing GSTIN, and the wrong ones were valued and sorted by the date their credit would expire.
Specialists worked with three airlines to issue credit notes against the wrong GSTINs and fresh invoices to the right ones. Where an airline would not reissue, the credit was left unclaimed rather than taken at the wrong registration. Finance only decided how to handle travel for staff who moved between states during the year.
The Outcome
14,200 invoices were corrected and ₹86 L of credit was claimed at the registrations that bore the cost, all visible in GSTR-2B. The correction work finished within ten weeks, ahead of the November cut-off for the older year.
A simple GSTIN picker was added to the booking flow, and Each month's invoices are now checked against the traveller's state. The share of wrong-state tickets has dropped sharply, and the rest are caught and fixed in the same month.
Where the Recovered Amount Came From
₹ L
Illustrative.
Timeline
- Weeks 1–2Invoices pulled from airline portals, travellers mapped to home states
- Weeks 3–5Wrong-state and missing-GSTIN tickets valued and ranked by time limit
- Weeks 6–9Credit notes and reissued invoices obtained from three airlines
- Week 10Credit claimed at correct GSTINs, monthly recovery statement started
Credit belongs at the registration that bears the cost, not wherever the airline sent the invoice.
The fastest fix is at booking: make the correct GSTIN the default for each traveller.
Do not claim credit at the wrong GSTIN to save time; correct the invoice instead.
Illustrative case study based on a typical engagement. Client name withheld and details changed to protect confidentiality. Open the full case study
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