Returns & statutory work

The work beside the audit, and it has its own deadlines

A practice does not only audit. It reconciles a purchase register against a portal statement, checks deducted tax against Form 26AS, computes advance tax, assembles a tax audit report and watches a calendar it cannot afford to miss. All of that is arithmetic against effective-dated rules — which is to say it is exactly the kind of work that is tedious to do by hand and unforgiving when it is done wrong.

What it covers

Five kinds of work, each with its own way of going wrong

Every one of these is arithmetic against a rule with a date on it, which is why they belong beside the engine rather than in a separate product.

GST against the portal statement

The purchase register reconciled against the portal’s statement invoice by invoice, with what is missing in the books, what is in excess of the portal and where the tax itself disagrees each reported separately rather than collapsed into one difference.

Matched, missing in books, excess in books and tax mismatches reported as four distinct outcomes
Supplier-wise ageing of mismatches, so a supplier who has not filed for three months looks like one
Input credit difference stated as a figure that ties, not as an approximate reconciliation
The statement compared against the earlier auto-populated one where both are available

Input credit eligibility and reversal

Ineligible credit is identified against the statutory categories and disallowed with the rule cited on the line it disallowed — motor vehicles, food and beverage, and the rest — together with reversal where the rules require it. A disallowance with no citation is an assertion; with one it is a working paper.

The statutory category and the provision cited on the line, not in a footnote
Reversal computed where the rules require it rather than left as a manual adjustment
Ineligible credit totalled separately, so the eligible figure is a figure and not a residue
Every disallowance traceable to the invoice row it came from

Tax deducted, against Form 26AS

Books against the statement, deductor by deductor and section by section. Section rates are applied properly and a lower-deduction certificate is recognised rather than reported as a shortfall, which is the false positive that makes this reconciliation useless if it is done naively.

Section-wise statutory rates applied, with the applicable rate shown against the statutory one
Lower-deduction certificates recognised, so a certificate is not reported as under-deduction
Per-deductor variance between the statement, the books and what was actually deposited
A variance report that ties, and says so, rather than a list with a note about differences

The tax audit report and the computation

The clauses of the tax audit report, the depreciation schedule that feeds them and the computation itself — under the regime and the treatment somebody selected, against the rate set for the assessment year, with surcharge banded and marginal relief applied.

Depreciation computed against the rates for the year rather than against a table in a file
Surcharge banded properly and marginal relief applied, which is where a naive computation goes badly wrong
The alternative regimes and the minimum-tax provisions computed rather than assumed away
Every clause figure traceable to the ledger row underneath it

The due-date calendar

Advance tax, the tax audit report, the return, the GST returns and the deducted-tax filings on one calendar, with what is overdue and what is about to be flagged rather than left to be noticed. Due dates, not reminders.

Real due dates for the year in question rather than a generic checklist
Overdue and at-risk surfaced without being asked for
Across the clients a member is responsible for, not one client at a time
The same dates the dashboard reads, so the calendar and the dashboard cannot disagree

For the audit half

The report is a form, and the form has rules

An audit report is not free prose. Its structure, its modifications and the paragraphs that may be added to it are prescribed, and software that treats it as a template invites a report that says something other than what was intended.

The report follows the prescribed structure, and a modification changes the report rather than adding a sentence to it.
A matter emphasised and a matter reported as key are different things with different consequences, and are kept different here.
Material uncertainty about going concern has its own treatment rather than being folded into general commentary.
A section type the software does not have a registered structure for raises rather than falling through into free text.
Management letter points are held as records against the engagement, not as a document somebody rewrites each year.

Said plainly

Statutory data is a maintenance commitment, not a dataset

Rates are revised, thresholds move, due dates are extended and a form that was right last year is wrong this year. Any product in this category is only as current as the person whose job it is to keep it current — so we would rather tell you that than let a page imply the software knows things it cannot know. Rate sets are effective-dated per assessment year and loaded from one reviewed, checksummed source each, and a year nobody has reviewed is refused rather than computed with the previous year’s numbers. Every computation records which rate set produced it, so if a set is later found wrong, the figures it produced can be found rather than guessed at. If you find something stale, telling us is the fastest route to it being fixed, and we would rather hear it from you than have you find out from an assessment.

Tell us which of these you actually spend the time on

A practice that lives in GST reconciliation and one that lives in statutory audit want different things shown to them first, and the honest answer for one is often not the answer for the other.

Talk to us For finance teams

Get in touch

Talk to the people building it

No chatbot and no ticket queue. Tell us what your practice actually looks like — how many members sign, how many prepare, which of audit, tax and compliance you do most of — and someone who works on the software will reply.

info@legosphere.com