AWRA OpsHub Search

For India

Nothing was sold, nobody was paid, and you owe a tax invoice.

Move a pallet from your Pune warehouse to your Hosur warehouse and you have made a taxable supply between distinct persons. There is no customer, no money changes hands, and the goods never left your ownership — but there is an invoice, an e-way bill, in most cases an invoice reference number, and a quantity of input tax credit that has just moved from one state's balance to another's. Every other market in this corpus treats an internal transfer as a logistics event. India treats it as a tax event, and that single fact reshapes what a warehouse network costs to run.

Compliance
No IRP connection, no IRN, no e-way bill, no GST returns. Your existing stack does that and does it well. This page is about what happens before a document exists.
Tax rate
Slabs rather than a rate. Our country profile carries the standard slab as a default; what applies is per item and belongs with your accountant.
Payroll
No provident fund, ESI, professional tax or salary TDS. Our maintained payroll engine covers Kenya only. Keep yours where it is.
Support
Nairobi, remote, in English. Two and a half hours behind you, with no local partner who can be on site — a real disadvantage in this market.

An internal transfer, as the tax system sees it

One pallet, one state line, four obligations

This is an ordinary internal replenishment — the kind a distributor does forty times a week and nobody in the business thinks of as a transaction. Follow what the tax system thinks is happening. The point of the sequence is not that any single step is hard. It is that the whole thing is generated by your operations rather than by your finance team, and the finance team is who finds out when it went wrong.

  1. It leaves

    A supply happens with no sale in it

    Registrations in two states are distinct persons under GST, so a transfer between them is a supply even though no consideration passes. That means a tax invoice, raised by the sending location, valued under the rules for transactions between related parties rather than at whatever number is convenient — with a specific relief where the receiving unit can claim full credit. The people who trigger this are storekeepers, and the document is a tax document.

  2. It travels

    A movement document with its own clock

    Goods above the threshold need an e-way bill before they move, carrying the consignment, the vehicle and a validity that is calculated from distance rather than chosen. Change the vehicle mid-route and the transport details need updating. Let the validity lapse and the consignment is travelling without a valid document, which is a detention risk at a checkpost rather than a filing problem next month.

  3. It registers

    And the clock nobody watches

    If your turnover puts you in scope, that internal invoice needs an invoice reference number from the portal like any other business-to-business document — and above the higher threshold it has to be reported within thirty days of its date or the portal refuses it outright. An invoice the portal will not register is not a late invoice. It is not a valid tax document at all, and the reason it was late is almost never tax. It is that nobody closed the paperwork on a movement that physically happened five weeks ago.

  4. It arrives

    And your credit is now in a different state

    The receiving registration claims the credit the sending one charged. Do this cleanly and it nets out. Do it carelessly — wrong state, wrong value, a transfer recorded in the stock system but never invoiced — and you have accumulated credit in a state that cannot use it while paying cash in the state that needed it. This is real working capital, it is invisible in an operations report, and it is discovered during a reconciliation months later.

Where we fit, stated before you read any further: we do not generate the invoice reference number and we do not generate the e-way bill. Those belong to the compliance stack you almost certainly already have. What produces all four obligations above is a movement of physical goods between two locations — and *that* is the record we keep, with the origin, the destination, the quantity, the date it actually left and the date it actually arrived. The paperwork is downstream of an operational fact. Most of the failures above are failures to record the fact.

Five questions worth asking inside your own business, before you ask any vendor

  1. How many stock transfers between states did you make last month, and does that number come from a report or from an estimate?
  2. For each one, is there a documented arrival — a receipt against the dispatch — or does the stock simply appear in the destination's count?
  3. How much stock is in transit between your own locations right now, and whose balance sheet is it on?
  4. When a transfer is short on arrival, where is that recorded, and who reconciles it against the invoice that was raised for the full quantity?
  5. Is there any state where your accumulated input tax credit is growing faster than you can use it? That is usually a transfer-valuation story rather than a tax story.

What this costs today

Four failures that all begin as operational and end as financial

None of these is a compliance failure at the point it happens. Each becomes one later, which is why the compliance stack is the wrong place to look for the cause.

Transfers that leave but never arrive

A dispatch is recorded, an invoice is raised for the full quantity, and the receiving location counts what actually turned up. Between those two numbers is a difference that nobody owns, and it is only visible if the arrival is a document rather than an assumption.

Credit accumulating in the wrong state

Transfers valued carelessly move input tax credit somewhere it cannot be used, while the state that needed it pays cash. It is real working capital, it does not appear in any operations report, and it is usually found in a reconciliation long after the movements that caused it.

The thirty-day clock running on an operational delay

The reason an invoice misses the reporting window is almost never a tax reason. It is that a delivery was never confirmed, a site never signed off, a transfer was never closed. A back-office cutoff turns an ordinary operational lag into a document the portal will refuse.

Landed cost absorbed into overhead

Freight, clearing, handling and demurrage arrive weeks after the goods on separate invoices. Once they settle into an overhead line, the unit cost you price against is confidently wrong — and in a business running on distribution margins, confidently wrong is expensive.

The comparison, run honestly

Who should not buy this, which is most people reading it

India has the deepest and cheapest business software bench of any market in this file. That is not a compliment we are paying to be gracious — it is the single most important fact about buying software here, and a vendor page that talks around it is telling you something about the vendor. Here is the comparison as we would actually run it.

You need GST filing, IRNs and e-way bills 01

What that means

Buy Tally, Zoho Books, Busy or one of a dozen others. They cost a fraction of what we do, they are connected to the portal, your chartered accountant already works in them daily, and there is an implementation bench in every city in the country.

Where we stand

We would be worse at this in every measurable way. We have no IRP connection, no e-way bill generation and no Indian payroll engine, and building them would not make us better than an incumbent who has done it since 2017.

You need statutory Indian payroll 02

What that means

Provident fund, ESI, professional tax that varies by state, TDS on salary. This is a serious per-state compliance surface maintained by specialists.

Where we stand

Our maintained statutory payroll engine covers Kenya only. Keep payroll where it is. We hold the employee record and attribute labour cost to jobs; we do not compute a statutory deduction.

You are a single-state business with one location 03

What that means

Then the argument at the top of this page does not apply to you at all. No state lines, no transfers between distinct persons, no credit stranded anywhere.

Where we stand

You should buy the cheapest thing that files correctly. We would be an expensive way to solve a problem you do not have.

Your problem is that operations and the ledger disagree 04

What that means

Stock in six locations that only reconciles at year end, transfers with no documented arrival, purchase orders in email, landed cost in an overhead line, projects whose real cost nobody can produce, assets held by whoever last signed for them.

Where we stand

This is the band we are actually good at, and it is a real band. It is an operations layer sitting alongside the compliance stack you already have, not a replacement for it. If this is not your problem, the honest recommendation is the row above.

The narrow case where a Nairobi vendor is a sensible thing to buy in India

It exists, it is narrower than we would like, and describing it accurately is more useful to both of us than widening it.

  • You run physical operations — stock, sites, plant, procurement — across more than one state.
  • Your compliance stack works and you are not looking to replace it.
  • The thing that actually costs you money is that nobody can tell you what is where, at what cost, right now.
  • You have written off spreadsheet reconciliation as a permanent tax on the finance team and want to stop paying it.
  • You would rather have one operations system than a warehouse tool, a projects tool and a purchasing tool that do not speak.
  • And you can live with an English-only interface, because your operations floor already works in English.

If four of those six are true, there is a conversation worth having. If fewer, we would rather say so on the first call than at the end of a procurement process. We have lost deals in this market for exactly the reasons on this page and we would rather lose them faster.

Scope, stated plainly

The longest not-built list in this corpus, and it is long on purpose

In a market with this bench, an honest scope is a narrow one. Everything we would decline to build here is something somebody local already does better.

Scope in India, stated before the demo

Running in the product today

  • Multi-location stock with each warehouse, depot and site store as a distinct position, governed transfers, in-transit visibility and blind counts with valued variance.
  • Documented arrivals, so a transfer stays open until the receiving location confirms the quantity it actually received.
  • Procurement that refuses above a threshold, with RFQ comparison, recorded award reasons and three-way matching.
  • Landed cost on the consignment, so freight, duty, clearing and handling reach the unit cost instead of an overhead line.
  • The rupee as a base currency preset, with foreign-currency purchases held in their own currency at the rate actually applied.
  • Asset custody, project costing and a full audit trail of who changed what and when.

Not built — and in this market the list matters more than usual

  • No IRP connection and no IRN generation. We do not register invoices, we do not return the signed QR onto a document, and we do not watch the thirty-day reporting clock for you. Your existing compliance stack does this and does it well.
  • No e-way bill generation. No creation, no cancellation, no Part-B vehicle updates, no validity tracking. We record the movement that requires one. We do not produce one.
  • No GST return preparation. No GSTR-1, no GSTR-3B, no 2B reconciliation, no Invoice Management System actions on inbound documents. This is a large and genuinely well-served surface and it is not ours.
  • No Indian statutory payroll. No provident fund, no ESI, no professional tax by state, no TDS on salary. Our maintained payroll engine covers Kenya only.
  • No Indian-language interface. English only, documents included. Your commercial floor is very likely fine with that; a warehouse in a tier-three town is a different test and you should run it with the people who would key transactions.
  • No local implementation partner. Onboarding is remote from Nairobi. Against a market where an implementer can be in your office tomorrow morning, that is a real disadvantage and not one we can argue away.

That is the longest not-built list on any page in this corpus, and it is long for a reason: in India the honest scope is narrow. We are an operations layer for businesses whose compliance is already handled and whose actual problem is that the physical business and the ledger disagree. Anybody selling you a single system that does both halves in this market is either much larger than us or is describing a roadmap.

How this starts

Three moves, and the third one may be "not us"

01

Count last month's interstate transfers

Get the number from a report rather than from a person. Then take four of them at random and try to find the documented arrival — the receipt against the dispatch, with the quantity that actually turned up. If three of the four are assumptions, you have found the thing this page is about, and it costs an afternoon rather than a procurement process.

02

Ask where credit is accumulating

Your chartered accountant can tell you in an hour which state registrations are building input tax credit faster than they can consume it. That is often read as a tax question. It is usually a transfer-valuation and transfer-documentation question, which means it is an operations question with a finance symptom.

03

Then decide whether you need us at all

If the answer to both of the above is "we are fine", buy the cheapest thing that files correctly and spend the money elsewhere — we mean that. If the answer is that nobody can produce what is where at what cost, that is the conversation, and it is a different conversation from the one every other vendor in this market is having with you.

Questions we are asked here

Answered in full, including the ones that lose us the deal

Do you connect to the IRP or generate IRNs?

No. We do not register invoices with an invoice registration portal, we do not return the invoice reference number and signed QR onto a document, and we do not track the thirty-day reporting window. This is the most crowded software category in India and the incumbents are good at it, so building a worse version of it would not help you. What we do is keep the operational record — the movement, the receipt, the confirmation — that the document is created from, so the document can be raised on time rather than reconstructed five weeks later.

Is a stock transfer between our own warehouses really a taxable supply?

Where the two locations are separately registered in different states, yes — registrations in different states are distinct persons under GST, and a supply between distinct persons is taxable even without consideration. That brings a tax invoice, an e-way bill above the movement threshold, an invoice reference number if your turnover is in scope, and a corresponding credit for the receiving registration. Transfers between locations under the same registration in the same state are a different matter. This is a summary for orientation and the treatment turns on your specific registration structure — confirm it with your chartered accountant rather than with a vendor page.

How should transfers between our own units be valued?

Under the valuation rules for supplies between distinct persons rather than at whatever figure is administratively convenient — but with an important practical relief: where the receiving unit is entitled to full input tax credit, the value declared on the invoice is generally accepted as the open market value. In most ordinary businesses that makes this far less painful than it first sounds. It stops being harmless where the receiving unit cannot claim full credit, or where transfers are being valued inconsistently across a network, which is one of the ways credit ends up stranded in the wrong state. Your adviser should confirm your position.

What is the thirty-day rule and does it apply to us?

Two separate thresholds get conflated here, so it is worth keeping them apart. Invoice registration itself applies where aggregate annual turnover exceeds five crore rupees. The thirty-day reporting limit — under which the portal refuses a document presented more than thirty days after its date — applies at aggregate turnover of ten crore rupees and above. If you are in the second group, a document that misses the window does not become a late document; it becomes one that cannot be registered at all. The reason it missed is almost never a tax reason, which is the operational point this page is built on.

What GST rate does the system use?

Our country profile carries eighteen per cent as the standard slab, and that is a default rather than a claim about any particular item. India runs slabs rather than a single rate — the 2025 reform collapsed the old four-slab structure to five and eighteen per cent with a demerit rate on a short list — so the rate that matters is the one on the item, set by you and confirmed by your accountant. We would rather tell you that than imply a country-wide rate exists.

Why would we buy from a Nairobi vendor when Tally exists?

For most readers, you would not, and the second block on this page says so at more length. Tally, Zoho, Busy and their peers are cheaper, connected to the portal, and supported by an implementation bench in every city. The narrow case where we are a sensible purchase is a business running physical operations across several states, whose compliance is already handled, and whose real cost is that stock, procurement, projects and assets live in separate spreadsheets that only agree at year end. That is an operations problem rather than a compliance one, and it is a genuinely different product category. If that is not your problem, buy the incumbent.

Where does support come from, and what about the time difference?

Nairobi, remote, in English. India is UTC+5:30 and Nairobi is UTC+3, so there is a two and a half hour difference — our morning overlaps your afternoon, which works, but you should know that there is no local office and no partner who can be on site tomorrow. In a market where that is the norm, it is a real disadvantage and we would rather state it here than have you discover it during implementation. The working week and public holidays are configured rather than assumed.

Find four transfers with no arrival

Take last month's interstate stock transfers, pick four, and look for the documented receipt at the other end. You can do this without us and it will tell you more than a demo would. If they are all there, we are probably not what you need — and that is a useful answer too.