In this guide 6 sections
Ask who decides place of supply. Ask what stops a faulty invoice from saving, what happens during portal downtime, who holds the credentials, what the daily Tally report shows and how rate changes arrive. Treat any compliance certification claim as noise.
Who decides the tax split, and where is that rule kept?
Request a live demo with a buyer in Pune, a depot in Hyderabad and a supplier in Mumbai, then watch which field drives CGST, SGST or IGST. Clerks picking by hand cause errors.
Then ask where the rule lives, since a good answer is a table your accountant can read, with an effective date on each change. A weak answer is vendor-only code. Walk away from it.
Ask what happens to old invoices when the table changes, because each should keep the treatment it was issued under and must not be recalculated later. Anything else rewrites history.
- Tax head chosen by rule, not typed in
- Ship-to state required on goods invoices
- Rule table visible to your accountant
- Changes dated, old invoices untouched
What actually stops a bad invoice from being saved?
Ask for a live demonstration of failure. Enter a GSTIN with a wrong fifteenth character, leave the HSN blank and reuse a document number from last week’s series. Then back-date an invoice outside its series, change a unit from NOS to a typed word and watch whether a plain message appears beside the field. A serious package refuses each one.
A package that accepts everything pushes the burden onto your staff, who then chase problems from an exception report days after the invoice has already reached the customer. Reports are a second line. The save button is the first.
Ask about overrides too, meaning who may force a save, whether the system records the reason and the user, and whether a supervisor sees every forced invoice daily.
Portal downtime, credentials and failed calls
Ask what the billing screen does when the IRP times out; the right answer is a pending status, a scheduled retry and a supervisor queue. Freezing is unacceptable. Silent saves without an IRN are worse.
Ask who holds the portal login, then find out how you would take it back and what happens to your invoice history if you leave the vendor. The login belongs to you.
Request a sample of the error log and look for the portal’s message beside each failed invoice, because a log that only says failed hides the field.
- Queue and retry for unavailable portal
- Credentials held by you, stored securely
- Portal message shown against the invoice
- Export of all IRN data on request
Tally reconciliation and rate changes
If your accountant works in Tally, ask for the daily reconciliation report listing every invoice, credit note and receipt with the matching Tally voucher beside each one. Any gap in taxable value, tax head or ledger should be flagged, so ask how often the report runs and who reads it each morning.
Ask how a change in a tax rate or an HSN classification reaches you, whether as a patch, a rule update you approve or a manual edit. Request the last three changes with their dates, so you can judge how quickly each one reached existing customers and whether any arrived after the effective date.
No recent changes named means none made. Press for dates.
Why no vendor can certify your compliance
Compliance belongs to the registered person, meaning your business and its authorised signatory, and your accountant interprets the law whatever the software does. Software can apply rules and keep records. Your returns carry your name. No tool can sign for you. Treat automatic compliance as a warning sign.
Take this list to two or three vendors, score each answer from one to five and bring your accountant and one awkward invoice to the final demonstration.
Vendor question scorecard
One page, a row for each question and a column for each vendor, covering place of supply logic, blocked saves, portal queue and credential ownership. More rows cover the Tally reconciliation report, rate change delivery, data export and support response, and each cell holds a score plus the evidence seen on screen.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Should the vendor hold our portal credentials?
Prefer not. The credentials identify your business to the portal, so ownership should stay with you while the software gets access it can use and you can revoke.
Do we need Tally if the billing software handles GST?
Not always. Many accountants still prefer to close the books in Tally, so ask what yours uses and whether the two systems support a daily reconciliation between them.
Is a vendor that says it is GST certified better?
Be wary. Compliance sits with the taxpayer, so look instead for demonstrated behaviour such as blocked saves, dated rules and a clear audit trail on every edit.