Instructions for GST India

[Deva -]

Frank,

Read the wiki and spent better part of my day trying to generate a template, but I am sorry to say I give up.

The wiki assumes one is familiar with xml and how gnucash uses xml - neither of which I am comfortable with.

Here’s what I tried -

First I tried to look at my raw xml datafile to map the instructions from wiki onto my datafile. But I got lost in all the encodings and tags and wasn’t sure even after all that effort, whether each account needs to assigned a new uuid.

Then I tried exporting just the account tree - instructions say I should be able to select just the accounts I want, but I found that no such choice is given and the whole tree gets exported. Though this was a much smaller file (because of no transactions), I noticed that tax table info wasn’t there (this is also mentioned in the wiki as a drawback to this method).

I then saved a copy of my datafile with a different name (as suggested by wiki to retain tax table info). I thought I will first clean up all the accounts/transactions by deleting everything except the GST related accounts. This opened up more issues than it solved. Some accounts could not be deleted because it complained about read-only transactions (voided transactions) being present. Others complained about conflicts with missing splits in scheduled transactions (presumably because I already deleted one of the accounts in the scheduled transaction).

I lost my motivation after that.

Having spent all day thinking about this, I am now wondering whether it would have been a futile effort even if I had succeeded in making a template.

Reason being - my use case for GST is only a subset of what Amish laid out. Even if we attempt to put Amish's comprehensive setup as a template, it cannot be used by all GST users in India. What we have posted is only one aspect of GST in India, mainly covering GSTR-3B and GSTR-1/2 components of the return. Then there are other aspects such as -

- composition dealers
- e-way bills (launched recently)
- export related services and such…

Those require a different set of returns to be filed, so the account hierarchy may be different as well. I am not conversant with the above aspects, so I can’t comment on what the appropriate account structure in that case would be.

Perhaps it’s better to wait until GST stabilises in India before we can think of introducing a general purpose template for all users. Or maybe, we are going to need different templates depending on who the user is - composition dealer, exporter, interstate supplier, etc.

Cheers,
Deva

> On 06-Feb-2018, at 8:02 PM, Frank H. Ellenberger <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Am 06.02.2018 um 13:07 schrieb Deva -:
>> And yes, it can certainly go on the wiki for those looking for help.
>> I wish I had something like that to guide me when I was doing the
>> same, but with trial and error, I got to what I wanted.
> 
> Or, if one of you were volunteering to create a template, we could ship
> it with future releases.
> 
> The basics to create one are described in
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Account_Hierarchy_Template .
> 
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation#How_to_translate_the_files_containing_the_new_account_hierarchies
> might have additional tips.
> 
> Regards
> Frank