Uday Dhote: Invoicing work has doubled after GST

What has been the impact of GST on your customers? How are your customers coping with multiple GST slabs, tracking of invoices and movement of goods across state borders?
We have noticed that with our corporate clients with multiple products and pan-India distribution, it has affected the speed of making invoices, since on an average we need to make 25 invoices in place of one invoice for one PO. This work is doubled when there are two different rates for two sets of products. Moreover, these clients’ ERP systems have not yet fully accepted these kinds of volumes on the transaction side and the speed for clearance of invoices has been nightmarish. For other normal clients, it has been business as usual. Overall, the pace was slow at the start, but now it is slowly picking up. There has been no problem in movement of goods across state borders.

Do you believe it’s in our best interest that all our (printing and packaging industry) the tangible products are covered under HSN (Goods) so that there is a greater chance of coming under the manufacturing sector and acquiring industry status?
It’s just a myth. ‘Goods’ and ‘Services’ are having the same weightage in the GST Act. We are still under ‘manufacturing services’. We were in the so called ‘manufacturing’ status from the time of Independence. Did we acquire an industry status? For an industry to get prominence on the ministry’s chart there are a several things to be done, just acquiring ‘manufacturing’ status is not enough.

The Ministry of Finance issued a Notification No 31/2017-Central Tax (Rate) dated 13 October 2017, which formalised the decisions regarding the GST rates at the 22nd Council meeting on 6 October 2017. Is there clarity, finally? Please name one thing on your wish list for the government.
The ministry had promised to us in their Notification No 31 that they will come out with a clarification for the printers. So they did vide Circular No 11, dated 20 October 2017, which puts all the doubts to rest finally. I have also rolled out a clarification note from the AIFMP which sums up all the earlier notifications and guides the printers connected with AIFMP to follow a common path in GST era.