Hard validations on the portal, mandatory IMS action on every supplier invoice, and the return of CA certification for GSTR-9C — the new compliance regime explained for finance teams.
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Hard validations on the portal, mandatory IMS action on every supplier invoice, and the return of CA certification for GSTR-9C — the new compliance regime explained for finance teams.
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Budget 2026 introduced staggered ITR deadlines based on the form you file, expanded the scope of ITR-1, and liberalised the updated-return framework. A practical guide for individuals and businesses.
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From 1 April 2026, e-invoicing applies to every GSTIN with annual turnover above ₹5 crore. The 30-day reporting limit makes preparation non-negotiable.
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After two years of waiver, mandatory CA certification of the GST reconciliation statement is back from FY 2025-26. The compliance load is real — and so is the value of early engagement.
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From 1 April 2026, India runs two tax laws in parallel for one transition year. Here is what changes, what stays, and how to think about it.
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The new regime is the default. The old regime is still better for many people. Here is how to decide — without doing the maths in your head.
Read articleIn-depth analysis on each of the topics above — practical, current, and written for finance teams who need answers, not summaries.
The financial year 2026-27 has brought the most consequential GST changes since the regime was introduced in 2017. The portal no longer warns — it blocks. Provisional ITC claims are over. And businesses with turnover above ₹5 crore must once again obtain CA certification for GSTR-9C. Here is the full picture.
From 1 April 2026, any discrepancy between supplier-reported invoices in your GSTR-2B and what you claim in GSTR-3B will hard-block your return filing. Earlier the portal showed a warning; now it stops the submission entirely. There are no overrides and no grace periods. Every claim must reconcile — invoice by invoice.
The IMS now sits between every supplier's GSTR-1 and your GSTR-2B. Each invoice your supplier uploads appears in your IMS dashboard within 24 hours. You must explicitly Accept, Reject, or mark for Pending action. Critically: no action means deemed acceptance. Ignoring the IMS is no longer safe — a rejected vendor credit note can quietly reverse your ITC and create scrutiny exposure.
After being waived for FY 2022-23 and FY 2023-24, mandatory CA certification of the GSTR-9C reconciliation statement is restored for businesses with aggregate turnover above ₹5 crore, applicable from FY 2025-26 (filed in December 2026). If you have not engaged a Chartered Accountant for annual GST compliance, now is the moment.
All legal services provided by advocates and firms of advocates to any business entity are now covered under Reverse Charge Mechanism. This includes retainer fees, litigation fees, documentation, and consultation charges. Build this into your monthly RCM workings from April 2026 onward.
Start a fresh invoice/credit-note/debit-note document series from 1 April. File a new Letter of Undertaking (Form RFD-11) before raising any export invoice. Reconcile pending vendor credit notes in IMS. Review whether your turnover crosses the ₹5 crore GSTR-9C threshold. If you have foreign-recipient intermediary services, review whether they now qualify as zero-rated exports.
DJAC clients receive monthly IMS action reports and a pre-filing GSTR-3B reconciliation review so blocked returns never happen. Talk to us before your next filing cycle.
For Assessment Year 2026-27, the Income Tax Department has moved away from a single blanket due date and adopted a staggered schedule based on the ITR form you file. The change is small on paper but significant in practice.
Salaried individuals, pensioners, and investors filing ITR-1 (Sahaj) or ITR-2 continue with the traditional 31 July 2026 deadline. Freelancers, professionals, and small businesses filing ITR-3 or ITR-4 now have until 31 August 2026 — an extra month introduced specifically to ease pressure on non-audit business taxpayers. Businesses requiring statutory tax audit have until 31 October 2026, with the audit report itself due one month before.
Until last year, anyone with more than one house property had to abandon the simple ITR-1 Sahaj form and shift to the more complex ITR-2 or ITR-3. From AY 2026-27, ITR-1 has been widened to permit reporting of income from up to two house properties. Many salaried individuals with a self-occupied home and one rental property can now stay on the simpler form.
The Updated Return (ITR-U) framework has been substantially liberalised. Taxpayers can now file ITR-U even after receiving a reassessment notice. Filing with full payment of tax, interest, and the additional levy now grants immunity from penalties for under-reporting. The window for filing ITR-U for AY 2026-27 extends up to 31 March 2031 — a full 48 months.
Detailed disclosure of assets and liabilities under Schedule AL is now required only if total income exceeds ₹1 crore, up from the earlier lower threshold. This removes a significant disclosure burden for upper-middle-income earners.
The new tax regime remains the default for AY 2026-27. If the old regime works better for you (typically when you have substantial 80C, 80D, HRA, or home-loan interest claims), you must actively choose it while filing. Salaried individuals can switch every year; business-income taxpayers face stricter switching rules. Run the comparison before you file.
Confused which regime suits you? Our tax team runs a side-by-side comparison for every client before filing — typical savings range from ₹15,000 to over ₹2 lakh annually.
For thousands of mid-sized Indian businesses, 1 April 2026 marked the day e-invoicing stopped being a problem for large enterprises and became theirs. Here is what changes operationally — and how to prepare without disrupting your billing cycle.
From 1 April 2026, e-invoicing applies to every GSTIN with aggregate annual turnover above ₹5 crore in FY 2025-26. Turnover is measured PAN-level across all GSTINs — so a business with two state registrations totalling ₹6 crore is in, even if neither individually crosses ₹5 crore. This is a sharp reduction from the earlier ₹10 crore threshold.
Taxpayers with annual turnover of ₹10 crore and above are subject to a 30-day time limit for reporting e-invoices on the Invoice Registration Portal. After 30 days from the invoice date, the portal simply refuses the IRN — and without an IRN, the invoice is not a valid tax document. Same-day IRN generation is now best practice.
An e-invoice is not a separate document — it is your normal tax invoice with an Invoice Reference Number and a QR code generated by uploading the invoice JSON to the IRP. Once an IRN is issued, the invoice flows automatically to GSTR-1, the e-way bill system, and your customer's IMS dashboard. Get the upload right and a lot of downstream compliance handles itself.
Three issues recur at the threshold. First, billing software not configured for e-invoicing — every major ERP (Tally, Zoho Books, Busy, SAP) has e-invoicing modules, but they need activation and HSN-code cleanup. Second, B2C invoices incorrectly tagged as B2B. Third, credit notes raised without the corresponding e-IRN from the original invoice — these get rejected at IMS level and quietly destroy your customer's ITC.
Validate your turnover for FY 2025-26 against your books. Audit your HSN master data. Configure or upgrade your ERP. Train the team raising invoices on IRN generation. Set up a daily reconciliation between invoices raised and IRNs generated — any gap is a ticking compliance bomb.
Crossed ₹5 crore turnover this year? Our compliance team handles e-invoicing setup, ERP configuration, and the first three months of supervised operation — typically in 14 days.
It was easy to forget that GSTR-9C ever required a Chartered Accountant's signature. For FY 2022-23 and FY 2023-24, the certification was waived. That window has closed. For FY 2025-26 returns filed in December 2026, CA certification is mandatory again for every business above ₹5 crore in turnover.
GSTR-9C is the audited reconciliation statement that bridges your audited annual financial statements with the GST returns you filed during the year. It is not a second return — it is a reconciliation, identifying every difference between what your books say and what your GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B filings reported. Every variance must be explained.
The CA signing the GSTR-9C is certifying that the reconciliation is true and complete — drawing on professional independence and the firm's risk on the line. For tax authorities, this transforms the statement from a self-declared form into a piece of professional assurance, which fundamentally changes how it is scrutinised.
Every registered person whose aggregate turnover during a financial year exceeds ₹5 crore must file GSTR-9C along with the annual return GSTR-9, certified by a CA or Cost Accountant. Aggregate turnover is measured PAN-level. Composition dealers are exempt.
A meaningful engagement involves reviewing your books, reconciling turnover as per books with turnover as per GSTR-1, examining ITC claimed against ITC eligible, verifying rate-wise breakups, checking RCM compliance, and validating any reversals or special transactions. Where differences exist, they must be reconciled and explained in the prescribed format.
GSTR-9C filing season runs from October to December. By the time most businesses approach a CA in November, the auditor has limited time to do meaningful work — and if the books are messy, the certification becomes a stressful, rushed exercise. Businesses that engage early (July-August) get clean books, proper variance analysis, and a certification that withstands scrutiny.
If your turnover crosses ₹5 crore this year, talk to us in July. The early-engagement discount applies until 31 August every year and lets us do GSTR-9C properly.
The Income Tax Act, 2025 became effective on 1 April 2026 — but the older Income Tax Act, 1961 has not been retired. For FY 2025-26 (AY 2026-27), the old Act still applies. For income earned from FY 2026-27 onward, the new Act takes over.
Returns filed in 2026 — for income earned during FY 2025-26 — are governed entirely by the Income Tax Act, 1961. The new Act applies prospectively, to income earned from 1 April 2026 onward, which will be reported in returns filed in 2027. For one transition year, the e-filing portal supports compliances under both Acts simultaneously.
The new Act introduces the concept of 'tax year' to replace the older previous-year / assessment-year framework. Under the new Act, the tax year and the year of income are aligned, simplifying terminology. The first tax year under the new Act is 2026-27, with returns due in mid-2027.
The new Act brings a structural renumbering of tax forms. Form 16 becomes Form 130. Form 26AS is replaced by Form 168, with enhanced reporting. Forms 15G and 15H merge into a unified Form 121. The three tax audit forms (3CA, 3CB, 3CD) consolidate into a single Form 26. Update your internal templates and SOPs.
For AY 2026-27 returns being filed now, all familiar deductions hold: Section 80C (₹1.5 lakh), 80D, HRA under 10(13A), home loan interest under 24(b), and the rebate under Section 87A (income up to ₹12 lakh tax-free under the new regime). The old vs. new regime choice continues to apply.
If you discover undeclared income for AY 2026-27 or earlier years after 1 April 2026, you can still file an updated return (ITR-U) under Section 139(8A) of the old Act. Belated and revised returns for AY 2025-26 must be filed before 31 March 2026 — after that, only ITR-U is available.
The new Act is essentially a procedural and structural cleanup, not a wholesale policy reset. Substantive rules on rates, deductions, and exemptions remain comparable to the old Act. The real impact for most taxpayers will be felt in FY 2026-27 filings (due in 2027), not in this year's returns.
Setting up your books for the new Act framework? Our tax-tech team helps clients align ERP outputs, TDS schedules, and reporting templates so the 2027 filing season is uneventful.
Every salary season, the same question returns to our inbox: should I stay on the old tax regime or move to the new one? After Budget 2026 raised the rebate threshold to ₹12 lakh under the new regime, the decision changed for a large group of taxpayers.
The old regime preserves the classical deduction architecture: HRA, LTA, standard deduction of ₹50,000, Section 80C (₹1.5 lakh), Section 80D, 24(b) home loan interest. The new regime has a wider standard deduction (₹75,000) and a more generous rebate under Section 87A (income up to ₹12 lakh fully rebated), but disallows almost every Chapter VI-A deduction.
If your total deductions and exemptions exceed roughly ₹3.75 lakh, the old regime tends to come out ahead. This typically applies to taxpayers with a home loan (EMI interest near the ₹2 lakh ceiling), full ₹1.5 lakh Section 80C utilisation, HRA on metropolitan rent, and family health insurance under 80D. Salaried professionals in their 30s-40s with active investments and a housing EMI are the classic old-regime candidates.
If your income is up to ₹12 lakh and your deductions are modest, the new regime is almost always better — the ₹12 lakh rebate makes tax liability zero. Early-career professionals, gig workers, freelancers without rent-receipts, and salaried employees in tier-2 cities with low HRA all typically benefit from the new regime.
Salaried individuals (those without business or professional income) can switch between the two regimes every assessment year, freely. Taxpayers with business or professional income face stricter rules — they can opt out of the new regime only once, and switching back means another one-time choice.
Run the calculation both ways for FY 2025-26 using your actual numbers. Do not assume the answer from previous years still applies — the Budget 2026 changes meaningfully shifted the breakeven points. If your gross income is between ₹7 lakh and ₹15 lakh, the answer is more sensitive than ever to your specific deduction profile.
Want a precise comparison for your numbers? Send us your Form 16 and current investment summary. We run both calculations and recommend the regime that actually saves you money.
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