GST & Invoicing

Our GST registration

Om Taxi Service is registered under GST. Our GST registration certificate and our GSTIN are given on request and are printed on every invoice we issue; this page states our policy rather than reprinting the certificate itself.

A GST registration certificate is issued in Form GST REG-06 once an application has been examined and approved under the CGST Rules, and it carries more than a number: the legal name of the registered person, the constitution of the business, whether that is a proprietorship, a partnership, a company or otherwise, the principal place of business, and the date on which registration took effect. It is evidence of an examined registration rather than a claimed one, which is why we treat it, and the GSTIN on it, as a document to be produced rather than a line typed into a webpage where a single wrong digit could sit unnoticed for months.

We do not print the number here because a page of prose is not something your accounts team can check anything against; an invoice is. Every field a reconciliation actually reads sits on the tax invoice raised against your booking instead, where it belongs and where it is dated, numbered and auditable.

Two SAC codes cover what we do. SAC 9964 applies where we are running a contract-carriage transfer, point to point or on a fixed itinerary agreed with you. SAC 9966 applies where you have hired the vehicle and its driver for a period, a day rate or a multi-day assignment, rather than a specific transfer. Which one applies to your booking is stated on the quotation and carried through to the invoice.

Classification is not paperwork done for its own sake. Rule 46 of the CGST Rules requires a tax invoice to carry the SAC of the service supplied, and the code on your invoice is what your own accounting or GST software reads when it books the expense and reconciles it against our supply in your GSTR-2B. Two operators can offer, in substance, the same car and the same driver under two different SAC codes depending on how the booking was actually structured, a fixed transfer against an open-ended rental, and getting that classification right on our side is what lets your side treat repeated bookings with us consistently, rather than reconciling a different code every month for what your finance team reasonably expects to be the same kind of expense.

The rate we charge

The regulations allow more flexibility here than we use. Notification 11/2017-Central Tax (Rate), as amended, lets a supplier of passenger transport or of motor vehicle rental with operator choose between two rates for the same service: 5%, without input tax credit, or 18%, with full input tax credit. Some operators offer that choice customer by customer, quoting whichever rate suits the booking or the buyer on the day.

We charge GST at 5%, without input tax credit, on every chauffeur-driven hire. This is applied consistently across every booking; it is not varied customer to customer for the same service.

We do not offer a choice of rate. Whichever service you book, transfer or rental, the GST on it is 5%, without input tax credit.

Offered case by case, that election turns a tax classification into something closer to a pricing lever: the figure on the invoice can move depending on who is asking and what they need from it, and two customers booking an identical car on an identical route on the same day could walk away with two different totals for reasons that have nothing to do with the trip. We do not run that election in either direction. The rate on your invoice is the rate on every other invoice we issue for the same class of service that day, unconnected to your GST registration, the size of your organisation, or how the conversation with our desk went. It is a narrower position than the law allows, and it is the one we can stand behind without a qualification attached.

What this means for your input tax credit

Input tax credit is the mechanism that stops GST being collected twice inside one supply chain. A GST-registered buyer that pays tax on a genuine business expense can, subject to the ordinary conditions in the CGST Act, set that tax off against the GST it collects on its own outward supplies, so the tax passes through rather than adding to the buyer's own cost. Whether that mechanism is actually available on a given invoice is not a matter either side chooses case by case; it follows from the rate, and the conditions, the supplier has charged under.

Because we charge 5%, without input tax credit, no input tax credit is available on our invoice to any GST-registered client, body corporate or not. That follows from the rate itself rather than from who is billed: the rate and the absence of credit both sit at 5% by design, and there is no higher, credit-bearing rate on offer here as an alternative for a client who would rather have the credit than the lower headline figure.

Put in figures. On a booking with a taxable value of ₹10,000, our invoice carries ₹500 of GST at 5%, for a total of ₹10,500. An invoice from a different supplier charging the alternative 18%-with-credit rate for the same class of service would show a GST line of ₹1,800 and a total of ₹11,800, a larger figure on the page, and yet a registered buyer able to claim the credit recovers that ₹1,800 against its own output tax and is left, once the return is filed, having paid only the ₹10,000 base. There is no ₹1,800 to recover on our invoice: the ₹500 we charge is not creditable, so it sits in your books as a real, final cost of ₹10,500 rather than a pass-through of ₹10,000. The comparison your finance team should actually be running is not the total on either invoice; it is what each invoice costs after the credit position is worked through, and on ours that number is the total itself.

Where reverse charge also applies to your booking, because your organisation is a body corporate, a further question follows: whether you can claim credit of the tax you have self-assessed and paid to the government under that mechanism. That is governed by your own eligibility under section 17(5) of the CGST Act, which restricts credit on motor vehicle and rent-a-cab expenses used for passenger transport unless the recipient is itself in the business of transporting passengers, uses the vehicles to supply the same category of service onward, or uses them for driver training. Whether any of those apply to how your organisation actually uses the hire is a determination for your own tax adviser against your own facts, not something this page can settle in general terms.

For budgeting purposes, treat the GST on our invoice as a fixed cost line rather than a recoverable tax, and compare any quotation on the same basis: what each invoice actually costs after its own credit position, rather than the headline percentage printed on the front of it.

Reverse charge, for a body-corporate client

This is the section that decides who actually pays the GST, and on which invoice, if your organisation books us.

Ordinarily, GST works by forward charge: the supplier charges the tax on the invoice, collects it from the customer along with the price, and deposits it with the government in the supplier's own return. Reverse charge inverts the second and third steps only. The supply, the rate and the invoice still happen exactly as before, but the tax is not collected by the supplier at all; the recipient works out the tax itself, pays it directly to the government, and reports it in the recipient's own return rather than the supplier's.

Entry 15 puts that obligation on the recipient in one specific case: a small or unorganised supplier, typically an individual owner-driver or a proprietorship like ours, providing motor vehicle rental to a large, GST-registered organisation that is generally better placed to self-assess and remit the tax correctly than a great many small transport suppliers would be collectively. The rule shifts the compliance burden to the side of the transaction with the accounts department, not the side with the steering wheel.

Reverse charge on renting of motor vehicles. Under entry 15 of Notification 13/2017-Central Tax (Rate), reverse charge applies where the supplier is other than a body corporate, supplies to a body corporate, and does not charge the full-credit rate on the invoice. Om Taxi Service is a proprietorship. Accordingly, on our invoices to body-corporate clients, GST is payable by you under reverse charge, as stated expressly on every such invoice.

In practice: if you are a private limited company, an LLP, or another body corporate booking a chauffeur-driven vehicle from us, our invoice states the taxable value and the rate, and states that GST on it is payable by you under reverse charge rather than added to the amount you pay us. You self-assess and deposit that GST yourself.

Set the two side by side. Book the identical car for the identical route as an individual, or through a proprietorship or a partnership firm, and our invoice reads: taxable value, GST shown in figures as CGST and SGST or as IGST, and a total payable to us that already includes that tax; you pay us the full figure, and we account for and deposit the GST ourselves. Book the same car for the same route through a private limited company or an LLP, and the taxable value on the invoice is identical, but the tax line changes its character rather than its amount: instead of a rupee figure added to what you owe us, it reads that GST is payable by the recipient under reverse charge, entry 15 of Notification 13/2017-Central Tax (Rate), and the amount you actually pay us is the taxable value alone. The GST never appears in what you remit to us at all; your own finance team calculates it, deposits it with the government directly, and reports it in your own return, a second, entirely separate step that does not exist on the individual customer's side of the same transaction.

'Body corporate' is not a phrase we are choosing loosely. A private limited company and a public limited company are bodies corporate under the Companies Act, 2013. So, expressly, is a limited liability partnership: the LLP Act, 2008 defines an LLP as a body corporate in its own right, even though it is registered under a separate Act from the Companies Act altogether. A partnership firm formed under the Indian Partnership Act, 1932, is not a body corporate: a firm has no legal personality apart from its partners. Neither is a proprietorship, a Hindu Undivided Family, or an individual. If your organisation's registration certificate or letterhead reads Private Limited or LLP, treat the reverse-charge position above as applying to your booking; if it names a partnership firm or a proprietor, it does not.

If your organisation is a proprietorship, a partnership firm, an individual, or otherwise not a body corporate, reverse charge does not apply to your booking: we charge GST forward, as set out above.

Place of supply

For domestic passenger transport, where you are a GST-registered recipient, the place of supply is your own location as a registered person. Where you are not registered, the place of supply is where the passenger boards for the journey. Our invoice states which applies to your booking, and whether it carries CGST and SGST, or IGST, as a result.

Place of supply decides which government the tax belongs to, and whether the invoice you receive is correct for your own state's registration. Where the place of supply sits in the same state as our own registration, the invoice carries CGST and SGST in roughly equal halves, one to the centre and one to the state. Where it sits in a different state, the whole amount is IGST instead. This is not a formality: a registered buyer can only set off CGST and SGST charged against a registration held in that same state, so an invoice carrying the wrong split for where you are actually registered can leave a genuine, paid tax amount that your own return-filing software will not let you claim.

Take a concrete example. A company registered in Gurugram books an outstation transfer that picks up in Delhi and drops in Jaipur, and gives us its GSTIN at the time of booking. Because it is a registered recipient, the place of supply is not where the car actually travelled; it is Gurugram, the recipient's own registered location. Our own registration sits in Haryana, and Gurugram is in Haryana too, so this invoice is intra-state and carries CGST and SGST, however far the car drove into Rajasthan along the way. Change one fact only, the same booking made instead by a company registered in Bengaluru, and the place of supply moves with it: same trip, same driver, same rate, but the invoice now carries IGST instead of CGST and SGST, because the transaction has become interstate for GST purposes the moment the recipient's registration moved states. Where the recipient has given us no GSTIN at all, neither example applies: the place of supply is simply where the passenger got into the car, Delhi in this illustration, regardless of where either party happens to be registered.

What our invoice carries

Rule 46 of the CGST Rules sets out what a tax invoice legally must contain, and every line below exists because that rule requires it, or because it is what your own accounts team checks the document against. None of it is there to fill space.

• Our name, address and GSTIN
• A consecutive invoice serial number and the date of issue
• Your name and address, and your GSTIN where you have supplied one
• The SAC code and a description of the service
• The taxable value
• The rate and amount of tax, shown as CGST and SGST, or as IGST
• The place of supply
• Whether GST on the invoice is payable by us on forward charge, or by you under reverse charge

Our name, address and GSTIN

That the invoice is issued by a specific, identifiable, GST-registered person, the same one named on the registration certificate available to you on request, and not a template filled in after the fact.

A consecutive invoice serial number and the date of issue

That the invoice belongs to a single, unbroken numbering series maintained across the financial year, as Rule 46 requires; a gap or a repeat in that series is the first thing a GST audit checks, on our side of the transaction and on yours.

Your name and address, and your GSTIN where you have supplied one

That the supply is recorded against you specifically in our own GST return, and, where you have given us a GSTIN, that our return names your registration rather than only your company name, which is what makes the supply appear in your GSTR-2B in the first place.

The SAC code and a description of the service

What was actually supplied, in the classification your own accounting system reads, and the basis on which the rate and the reverse-charge position shown on the invoice were arrived at.

The taxable value

The base amount tax is calculated on, before GST is added, which is the figure your own books record as the underlying cost of the service.

The rate and amount of tax, shown as CGST and SGST, or as IGST

How much tax applies, and which government it is due to, worked out from the place of supply stated on the same invoice.

The place of supply

The state the tax is treated as arising in, stated explicitly rather than left for you to infer from the pick-up point, because it is this figure that decides CGST and SGST against IGST, not the route the car actually drove.

Whether GST on the invoice is payable by us on forward charge, or by you under reverse charge

Whose obligation it is to deposit the tax shown: the one line that changes completely between an invoice to an individual customer and an invoice to a body-corporate client under reverse charge.

Government fees and other pass-through charges

Where a government fee, a toll, a state entry charge or another statutory levy is collected from you and paid across at what it actually cost, that amount is a disbursement, shown on your invoice as a separate line at cost. It is not a fee we charge for our own service, and we do not add GST to it.

This treatment has a name in the GST rules: acting as a pure agent for that particular payment, under Rule 33 of the CGST Rules. It is available only where specific conditions are met together: you must have authorised us to make the payment on your behalf, the payment must be shown separately on the invoice rather than folded into our fare, we must not use whatever was paid for our own benefit or acquire any interest in it, and the amount recovered from you must be exactly what was paid out, no more and no less. Meet all four and the disbursement stays outside the taxable value of our own supply; miss any one of them and the amount is treated as part of what we charged you for the trip, and GST applies to it like any other component of the fare.

Take a concrete case: an outstation trip that crosses, say, a toll plaza charging ₹170. That ₹170 appears on your invoice as its own line, described as a toll, and it is exactly ₹170, not rounded up, not marked up, and not added into the taxable value the GST is calculated on. We recover it from you because we paid it to the toll operator on your behalf as the trip happened, not because it is a service we are supplying you; it carries no GST of its own on our invoice because it was never our supply to begin with. Where a receipt was issued for it, we can provide that as well.

Getting a GST invoice in your company name

The simplest way to get this right is to hand over the GSTIN at the time of booking or enquiry, rather than after the trip has run: a GSTIN given before the invoice is generated means it is correct from the first document, and one that arrives afterwards means a correction, which is slower for you and adds an extra document to your own filing even though the underlying trip and the underlying tax are identical.

If it reaches us after the invoice has already been issued, we correct it with a proper credit note and a fresh invoice rather than editing the original; the same process covers any other invoicing error found after issue. Our current e-invoicing position, if any applies to your booking, is confirmed at the time of contracting rather than stated here in general terms.

Along with the GSTIN, check that the legal or trade name we are asked to invoice matches what is registered against that GSTIN on the GST portal, rather than a shorter name used internally or on a purchase order. A mismatch between the name on our invoice and the name on your registration is one of the more common reasons a genuinely correct invoice still fails to match cleanly in a buyer's own GSTR-2B reconciliation, and it is avoidable entirely at the point the GSTIN is first given to us.

The correction itself is not an edit. Once issued, an invoice cannot simply be rewritten under the same number if it carries an error material to the tax charged; section 34 of the CGST Act requires a credit note referencing the original invoice, followed by a fresh, correctly numbered invoice. Both the credit note and the replacement appear in our GST return the same way the original invoice did, so the correction is visible and traceable on our side, and it is traceable on your side in exactly the same way.

E-invoicing under GST applies once a supplier's turnover crosses a threshold set by the government; where it applies, every invoice must carry a unique Invoice Reference Number and a QR code generated through the government's own Invoice Registration Portal before it counts as a valid tax invoice for input tax credit purposes. Whether that requirement currently applies to us depends on that threshold and on our own turnover in the relevant year, which is why we confirm our position at the time of contracting rather than printing a fixed answer here that a later year's figures could make wrong.

TDS, for a corporate client deducting at source

Section 194C of the Income-tax Act applies to a contract for carriage of passengers, so a corporate client paying us under a running contract deducts TDS in the ordinary way.

That deduction applies once a single payment to us exceeds ₹30,000, or once the total paid to us within the financial year crosses ₹1,00,000, whichever happens first; below both figures, no deduction is required on that particular payment, though the running total across the year still has to be tracked once other payments push it past the annual threshold. A single large wedding or corporate movement booking will usually cross the single-payment figure on its own. A company running smaller, regular bookings with us across the year should watch the aggregate rather than assume each individual bill is too small on its own to attract TDS. Because Om Taxi Service is a proprietorship, the payment is, for section 194C purposes, a payment to an individual, and the applicable rate is 1%, not the 2% that applies where the payee is a company or another entity; deducting at 2% here is simply the wrong rate rather than the cautious one.

The small-transporter exemption at section 194C(6), which lets a goods transporter owning ten or fewer goods carriages receive payment without TDS deduction on furnishing a PAN declaration, does not apply here. It is written for goods transport. We carry passengers, and section 194C(6) gives us no exemption from your TDS obligation.

The confusion is common enough to be worth ruling out directly rather than leaving it to be discovered at the time of an assessment. Section 194C(6) is genuinely available to plenty of transport vendors: a person in the business of plying, hiring or leasing goods carriages, owning ten or fewer of them at any point in the year, who furnishes a PAN declaration to that effect, can be paid without deduction. Where an accounts payable process runs a standing rule along the lines of small transporter, PAN on file, no TDS, it was very probably written with a trucking or logistics vendor in mind, and applying it to a chauffeur-driven car booking crosses a line the section itself draws: a goods carriage under the Motor Vehicles Act is a vehicle constructed or adapted to carry goods, and a sedan, an MPV, a tempo traveller or a coach carrying passengers is not one, however similar the paperwork looks. We will furnish a PAN declaration if your process asks for one on file; it will not, and cannot, bring us within section 194C(6), because the exemption was never about vehicle count or a declaration on file, it was about what the vehicle carries.

Getting this wrong sits on the deducting side of the transaction, not ours. Where TDS was required under section 194C and was not deducted, the shortfall, and interest on it, becomes the deductor's own liability under section 201, and the underlying expense can be disallowed in the deductor's own income computation under section 40(a)(ia) unless the shortfall is later cured. We would rather this page rule the question out for your finance team in advance than have it surface at the time of an assessment.

Questions about an invoice

Write to us at info@om-travels.in for an invoicing or GST query. If it is a complaint rather than a query, our Grievance Officer and the full escalation ladder are at /grievance-redressal, and our registered entity and office are confirmed at /company-information. Registered office: Grand Trunk Road, Panipat, Haryana.

Include the invoice number and the booking date if your query concerns a specific invoice; it lets us match it to the underlying trip and respond without a further round of questions.