Grow, Save Prosper with GST Suvidha Providers

Grow, Save Prosper with GST Suvidha Providers: When government rolled out the bomb of GST on tax payers; they were hyper with lots of questions on their minds. Then with day by day new progressions GST compliance become the biggest question for tax payers. Now the non-government body GSTN came down to rescue.

The GSTN-Pedia

With the whole limelight on GST, everybody is seeking out for hands to understand the complex IT behind it. Here starts the work of GSTN, Goods and Services Tax Network. It is a nonprofit non-government company, which will provide shared IT infrastructure and service to both central and state governments including tax payers and other stakeholders.

It is unique as it seeks, for the first time to establish such a body to act as a bridge. The portal envisions becoming a trusted National Information Utility (NIU) which provides reliable, efficient and robust IT Backbone for the smooth functioning of the Goods & Services Tax regimen enabling economic agents to leverage the entire nation as One Market with minimal Indirect Tax compliance cost.

In compliance of the Cabinet decision, GST Network was registered as a not for-profit, private limited company under section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956 with the following equity structure:

• Central Govt 24.5%
• State Govts 24.5%
• HDFC 10%
• HDFC Bank 10%
• ICICI Bank 10%
• NSE Strategic Investment Co 10%
• LIC Housing Finance Ltd 11%

The GSTN in its current form was created after taking after approval of Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers and Union Government after due deliberations over a long period of time.

MISSION OF GSTN

• Provide common Registration, Return and Payment services to the Tax payers.
• Partner with other agencies for creating an efficient and user-friendly GST Eco-system.
• Encourage and collaborate with GST Suvidha Providers (GSPs) to roll out GST Applications for providing simplified services to the stakeholders.
• Carry out research, study best practises and provide Training and Consultancy to the Tax authorities and other stakeholders.
• Provide efficient Backend Services to the Tax Departments of the Central and State Governments on request.
• Develop Tax Payer Profiling Utility (TPU) for Central and State Tax Administration.
• Assist Tax authorities in improving Tax compliance and transparency of Tax Administration system.

The GST System is going to have a G2B portal for taxpayers to access the GST Systems; however for suvidha of tax payers, government has given them making a choice of third party application known as GST suvidha provider also called as GSPs. The third party applications will connect with GST system via secure GST System APIs. The GSTN Portal will be at the front-end of the GST IT ecosystem for all taxpayers in all parts of the country.

The GSTN has finalized 34 GSPs for providing innovative and convenient methods to taxpayers and other stakeholders in interacting with the GST Systems. Taxpayer convenience will be the key to the success of GST India regime.

GSP being an important bridge between tax payers and government with in sync with GSTN have many functions to perform and will ensure GST compliance in a very easy manner. Let’s take a deep look at 5 GSPs and what they have in their buckets for tax payers.

Excellon Soft ware: Exactly Excellent

With over 30,000 users in over 8500 locations worldwide Excellon Software is renowned for its cutting-edge yet simple-touse sales, distribution, and service management software since its inception in 2000. Excellon’s research continues to leverage latest advances in Cloud, Mobility and Analytics for innovative solutions to difficult problems of enterprises and their customers.

Excellon Software has introduced EXACT suite on a subscription based model. EXACT is a sub-brand of Excellon Software created with a single goal to ensure hassle free GST compliance for businesses.

Vinod Tambi, COO, Excellon Software

Vinod Tambi, COO says, ‘EXACT by Excellon Software in its role as a GST Suvidha Provider (GSP) will provide innovative methods to tax payers in interacting with the GST Systems for end to end GST compliance. EXACT GSP will provide all user interfaces and convenience to enable the taxpayer to connect with GST system via secure GST system API’s.’

What EXACT will do

• Integrated GSP/ ASP Solution to Enterprise: EXACT SUITE
• Enterprise application invokes Excellon’s rich APIs to send data to Excellon EXACT SUITE
• Excellon to offer GSP application as add-on solution to Enterprise through Web Portal and Mobile App
• End User to perform all GST Compliance in Excellon EXACT SUITE and/or Mobile App

GSP Solution for Enterprise /Third Party ASP Solution: EXACT PASS

Excellon to provide all GSTN APIs to the Enterprise/ Third Party ASP Solution as per GSTN guidelines through EXACT PASS By consuming the APIs, Enterprise / Third Party ASP Solution to build all the relevant functionalities and process workflow for GST compliance as mandated by GSTN.

GSPs has to be available for tax payer when ever they want them to be. ‘As a GSP and IT platform provider, Excellon will monitor, all the technology mandates by GSTN and GST law compliance requirements which will be implemented and updated as and when required. And for this we have designed our infrastructure on Microsoft Azure Cloud platform and that to be within India’ Says Vinod.

What else is under the Excellon umbrella:
• seamless and secured integration of EXACT GSP Solution with GSTN System.
• 24*7 Log monitoring for absolute security.
• Solution has in-built capabilities to check data hygiene and integrity with the help of various field-level and process-level validations.
• The GSPs will also maintain taxpayers’ individual business ledgers -- sales and purchase ledger -- and other value-added services but within some guidelines like product audit will be conducted before going live on 1st of July along with annual audit thereafter and usage of MPLS lines will be done when exchanging data with GSTN. While there are other points as well which are available on public domain.
• Generally, there are some sort of SLAs under which GSPs has to work while according to Excellon there are no SLAs have been received from GSTN. ‘for rich customer experience, we as a GSP will take all possible measures to ensure smooth and fail-safe data exchange with GSTN system.

Alankit Limited: GST’s Alankar
Alankit Ltd after building strong and successful portfolio in financial services and e-governance space with offerings like UID enrollment (Aadhaar), TIN and PAN facilitation, e-Return intermediary and more, a recent milestone for the company
has been identification and authorization by GSTN as a GST Suvidhaa Provider (GSPs).
The aim is to provide convenient methods to taxpayers and other stakeholders in interacting with the GST ecosystem from registration of entity to uploading of invoice details to filling of returns.

Ankit Agarwal, Managing Director, Alankit

Ankit Agarwal, Managing Director, Alankit says, ‘As a GSP, Alankit Ltd. with dozens of ASP (application Service Providers) is working on customizing applications for its clients which will be integrated with their current system and help them send data to the GST portal in encrypted format.’

He further added, ‘We are also working on Mobile apps. We have recently launched a portal called www.alankitgst.com for registration of ASPs, sharing relevant and useful communication for other stakeholders like tax professionals, CAs, large MNCs, SMEs, other Businesses, Taxpayers etc.’

GSPs will play a very important role in extending services to the tax payers for complying with the upcoming GST regime, thus making the GST rollout easy & convenient for all the stakeholders. GSPs will provide the much needed support enabling taxpayers to comply with the provisions of GST law through the web or mobile based interfaces. Alankit will facilitate the tax payers in uploading invoices as well as filing of returns and act as a single stop shop for all GST related services.

Alankit is fully prepared to fulfil its role as a GST Suvidha Provider says Ankit, ‘We have developed seamless interfaces for tax payers to interact with the GST network, we have expanded our existing teams by hiring competent and experienced Tax professionals and IT experts. Alankit GST leads are qualified indirect tax experts who will support customers in the GST compliance.’
As a GSP, Alankit will take the following steps to ensure compliance :
• Compile invoice wise data from the business units. (B2B and large value B2C)
• Upload invoice wise sales register (supply data) in GSTR-1 within 10 days from the end of the month.
• Download purchase data, i.e., inward supplies (receipts or purchase) in the form of draft GSTR-2 from the GST Portal. The draft GSTR-2 will be automatically created based on the GSTR-1 filed by corresponding suppliers.
• Cross-match purchases made with those downloaded from the GST portal. After reconciliation with the books and draft GSTR-2, upload the final GSTR-2 Reconciliation of the purchase register and data downloaded in the form of GSTR-2 from the GST portal will be carried out by the ASP for the benefit of taxpayer.

What tax payer gets with Alankit
Taxpayer will be provided with the integration option so that he can integrate their existing accounting packages with Alankit GST server. Further taxpayer will be provided backend services by Alankit.
Alankit has also recently launched a portal called www.alankitgst.com for registration of ASPs, sharing relevant and useful communication for other stakeholders like for other stakeholders like tax professionals, CAs, large MNCs, SMEs, Other Businesses, taxpayers etc.

Vayana Network: Digital GST Driver
Commenced its operations in 2009, Vayana Network offers businesses a simple way to manage their working capital and cash flow by enabling to finance their payables and receivables electronically through Banks and Financial Institutions. Similarly, With rich expertise in invoice matching and helping businesses to manage their working capital and cash flow, combined with unfailing technology support since 2009, Vayana Network had strong reason to participate and get em paneled as a GSP by GSTN. Sanjay Phadke, Consultant at Vayana says, ‘As a GSP, Vayana Network will facilitate the use of GSTN system to the businesses as well as application service providers to file the GST returns, match sales and purchase invoices to settle input tax credits. Vayana GSP services will hence help secure GSTN from direct exposure to users on internet as well as distribute the load in a large economy like India.’

Sanjay Phadke, Consultant, Vayana Network

The GSP will cater to the entire spectrum of multinational, large, medium or small enterprises, application solutions providers, tax consultants or tax preparatory service providers.

Overall, Vayana Network will manage the flow of data between ASP solution and GST
Network in a secured way with end-to-end data encryption for maintaining privacy. On Infrastructure front, Vayana claims that network has been architected for high availability and performance. Designed for anticipated peak loads of return filing for over 2 million GSTINs, our GSP’s fidelity to publish GSTN API’s and shared authentication protocol ensures security.

Here what Sanjay has to say about the network, ‘it is created by a team that has built US Telco and UK banks remittance systems, Vayana GSP is highly available, secure and concurrent with GSTN. It is hosted on stateless elastic network infrastructure; Vayana GSP has horizontal tech stack assuring high scalability and availability. A high degree of redundancy is built through multi location deployment, load balancing and auto-failover.’

Computer Age Management Services: Raising GST Stock
With 25 years of experience as an integral part of the Indian Financial infrastructure,
CAMS Group is another GST Suvidha Provider. CAMS is co-owned by — NSESIC, NSE Strategic Investment Corporation Limited, a subsidiary of National Stock Exchange, HDFC Group (a financial services conglomerate) and Acsys Investments Pvt Limited (the founding promoter).

As a suvidha provider CAMS believes that there are multiple services that they will
provide to a tax payer and CAMS application will provide meaningful and actionable dashboards, reconciliations that would facilitate Tax Payers in complying with GST Law.

M. Somasundaram, Chief Financial Officer, CAMS

M. Somasundaram, Chief Financial Officer at CAMS says, ‘Application will also send
alerts in the form of SMS and eMails on due dates, non-compliance etc. that would enable timely and comprehensive compliance. We are building actionable MIS that would enable Tax Payers to protect their input credit and identify non-compliant vendors. CAMS will also provide various file format upload option so that it is compatible with all types of ERP/ Accounting software without much changes.’

In terms of IT infrastructure, CAMS has three data centres (primary, in-city BCP and far site BCP centre) with huge IT infrastructure that meets the MF industry requirements. CAMS is also evaluating cloud option.

There are GSPs who are focusing on some specific verticals, on similar grounds, CAMS is currently working with financial services industry for meeting their requirement of generating invoices. Somasundaram says, ’CAMS is also closely working with NBFC and life insurance clients as we understand the intricacies of the transaction and do provide a niece product to them. Since CAMS has more than 63% of stake in Mutual fund industry, CAMS is also working with Mutual Fund industries and its distributor for creating a very specify software to cater to their requirements.

Bodhtree Consulting: GST Age Salvation

Hyderabad based Bodhtree has been selected as one of the GST Suvidha Provider
by GSTN for effective implementation of the GST across India. GST services of Bodhtree are called “GIST” (GST Intelligent Services for Taxation).

GVV Satyanarayana of Bodhtree tells us that their GSP solution is built with the best
of breed, open source technologies to enable secure, robust and fast communication. The GST solutions comes with some of the salient features such as Secure Communication, Scalability, Monitoring Your Activity, keep logs of all communication, utility APIs.

GVV Satyanarayana, Bodhtree Consulting

‘We at Bodhtree are constructing a super information highway in India with scalable
and reliable and secure connectivity to GSTN’ says Satyanarayana.

GoFrugal Technologies: Retailer’s Choice

GoFrugal Technologies is the only authorized GST Suvidha provider providing Billing Software for the Retail and Restaurant sector among the 34 GSPs that were shortlisted.

GSPs are subjected to provide easy ways to taxpayers and stakeholders in interacting
with GST systems. From registration of entity to uploading of invoice details to filing of returns, GSPs will act as a liaison between the stakeholders under the GST regime.