Last checked by Coal Boss
Schemes and rules change. Treat this as an explanation, and check the current notice on the official portal before you act.
GST work in a coal business splits into two halves that are easy to confuse, and knowing which half you are in saves a lot of argument. The first half is your own records: the tax worked out on each invoice, the registers that summarise it, and the reports a CA files from. The second half is the government system: the returns themselves, and anything read back from it. No amount of good record-keeping does the second half, and no filing fixes a problem in the first.
The first half starts on the invoice. Which tax applies on a coal sale is decided by where the supply is treated as happening — the two registrations on the document, yours and the customer's — and that decision drives whether the invoice carries central and state tax or the integrated one. The classification of the goods and the applicable rates sit alongside it, as does the cess that applies to coal. None of that is guesswork a trader should be doing per invoice: it should fall out of the registration details and the item, the same way every time, so that two identical sales are never taxed two different ways.
Freight is where coal businesses most often get caught, because the tax on the goods and the tax on moving them do not behave the same way. Depending on who the transporter is and how the service is supplied, the liability can sit with the recipient rather than the supplier. That is a question about the specific arrangement, not a rule to apply blindly, and it is worth settling once with your CA for each kind of transporter you use rather than deciding it invoice by invoice.
The registers are the summaries that make the first half checkable: outward supplies, inward supplies, the tax collected and the tax deducted at source where it applies. Their value is that they are built from the same documents as the books, so what the register shows and what the ledger shows cannot drift apart. A register assembled separately from the accounts is a second version of the truth, and the two will disagree at the worst moment.
The second half is the portal. Returns are filed there, and the statement of inward supplies that the portal assembles from what your suppliers have reported is produced there too. That statement is the one worth understanding: it is built from their filings, not yours, so it is the place a supplier's mistake becomes your problem — a bill they never reported, or reported against a different registration, or in a different period. Matching it against your own purchase record is how that gets caught, and the only practical answer to a mismatch is to go back to the supplier.
More detail
The reason to treat the two halves as separate is that they fail differently. A problem in your records is yours to fix and shows up as a figure that will not reconcile. A problem on the portal usually belongs to somebody else — a supplier who has not filed — and no correction at your end makes it go away. Traders who think of GST as one undivided job tend to go looking in the wrong place.
Periods matter more in coal than in many trades, because so much arrives late: a quality claim settled a month after delivery, freight agreed after the trip, a supplier bill that follows the material by weeks. Each can land after the period it belongs to has been reported. That is ordinary, and it is handled — but it is handled deliberately, with the adjustment recorded against the period it affects, not by quietly editing a period already reported.
Nothing here states a rate, a threshold, a due date or a window, and that is deliberate. All of them have changed, some more than once, and a figure repeated from memory or from an old article is how a business ends up confidently wrong. The position that applies to your registration, your goods and your transporters is a question for the portal and for your CA.
Common confusion
Keeping GST registers is not filing returns, and software that holds your tax records is not connected to the GST portal unless it says so. Returns are filed on the portal; the statement of inward supplies is produced there from your suppliers' filings, not from your books.
What it means if you trade coal
Settle the tax treatment once per kind of sale and per kind of transporter with your CA, so it is not re-decided per invoice. Keep the registers coming out of the same documents as the books, never alongside them. Match the portal's inward-supply statement against your own purchase record every period and chase the supplier, not the figure. And record late adjustments against the period they belong to rather than reopening one already reported.
How Coal Boss handles this · In Coal Boss today
GST works on the invoice: HSN-wise rates, coal cess, and CGST/SGST vs IGST decided from the two GSTINs. TCS is calculated and there is a TDS register. Reverse charge is handled on freight only, and input credit appears as a register to check — it is not claimed or filed. Coal Boss does not file GST returns.
From Coal Boss's verified product record — separate from the explanation above.
Hinglish mein, short mein
Coal ke business mein GST do hisson mein bantta hai. Aapke apne record: har bill pe dono registration se nikla tax, classification aur cess, freight ka treatment, aur wo register-report jinse CA file karta hai. Sarkari portal: return khud, aur inward supply ka statement jo portal aapke suppliers ki filing se banata hai. Us statement ko apne purchase record se milana hi supplier ki galti pakadne ka tareeka hai — aur sudhar supplier ke paas hota hai, aapki books mein nahi. Rate, threshold aur due date badalte rehte hain, is liye apne case ki sthiti portal ya CA se check karwa lein.
Sources
- ExplanationCoal Boss explanation of common coal-trade practice
- OfficialGoods and Services Tax portal
Coal Boss explanation of common trade practice — not a rule. Every business agrees its own terms.
