E-commerce Accounting & Compliance — Which Service Does Your Store Need?
Selling online splits compliance into pieces that do not sit together: settlement statements that never match the bank, two different tax deductions to claim back, a GST return cycle per state, and a P&L that looks nothing like your dashboard. This page is the map — it points you at the service that handles the part you are stuck on.
- One CA-led desk across books, GST and seller tax filings
- Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho and Shopify sellers
- Marketplace TCS and section 194-O credits both tracked
- Multi-state GST return cycles
- Reporting built from reconciled numbers, not dashboards
The Numbers Only Work Once They Are Reconciled
An online seller's books have a problem a shop's books do not: the money that lands in the bank is never the money the customer paid. Commission, shipping, RTO, storage and payment-gateway fees come out first, a slice is withheld as GST TCS and reported in GSTR-8, and another slice is deducted as income tax under section 194-O. Both of those are yours to claim back, and neither claims itself.
That is why the services below are sequenced rather than parallel. Reconciliation establishes what actually happened on each channel. Accounting turns that into books. GST return filing and seller tax support turn the books into filings, on a cycle that repeats per state you are registered in. Profitability analysis and MIS then read the reconciled numbers — which is the only point at which a contribution figure means anything.
If you are not sure where you are stuck, the fastest tell is whether your marketplace settlement report reconciles to your bank statement. If it does not, start at reconciliation. If it does, the question is usually a filing one.
Find the Service You Need
Eight services, grouped by whether you are getting the numbers right, filing them, or reading them.
Getting the Numbers Right
Filing Them
Reading Them
Why These Belong Together
Seller compliance breaks at the joins between these services, which is where splitting them across providers costs the most.
Both deductions get claimed
GST TCS sits in GSTR-8 and section 194-O sits in your income tax credits. They are deducted by the same marketplace and claimed in two different places. A team doing only one of the two will reconcile one and leave the other.
Reconciliation comes before reporting
A contribution margin built from a marketplace dashboard rather than a reconciled settlement is a guess. Doing the reconciliation and the reporting in one place is what makes the second one trustworthy.
Multi-state is a cycle, not a task
Stock in another state's fulfilment centre brings its own registration and its own return cycle. Handled together, the registrations and the filings stay in step instead of drifting apart.
CA and CS-led
The filings that follow from selling online — GST returns, TDS, ITR and the company's own ROC obligations — are prepared by qualified professionals rather than handed to software.
Questions Online Sellers Ask First
Self-contained answers on registration, marketplace deductions and where each service starts.
- For goods sold across state lines, yes. Inter-state supply of goods makes GST registration compulsory from the first invoice, whatever the turnover, so a seller shipping pan-India practically needs a GSTIN before the first order. A store selling purely within one state may still use the normal turnover thresholds. The threshold rules and the marketplace rules are not the same thing, which is where most sellers get caught.
- Marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart and Meesho deduct tax at source on the net value of taxable supplies they collect for you, and report it to the government in GSTR-8. It appears as a credit you have to accept on the GST portal before it can be used. It is not a cost — but it is only usable if someone reconciles the marketplace statement against the portal and accepts the credit, which is the work our reconciliation and GST return services do.
- Section 194-O is income tax deducted at source by the e-commerce operator on the gross amount of your sales. GST TCS is a GST-side collection reported in GSTR-8. They are two separate deductions, tracked in two separate places, and both have to be claimed back — the income tax one through your return, the GST one by accepting the credit on the portal. Sellers commonly reconcile one and forget the other.
- Start with payment and marketplace reconciliation, because multi-channel selling is where settlement statements, COD remittances and fee deductions stop matching the bank. Accounting and GST return filing sit on top of that reconciliation. If you also hold stock in another state's fulfilment centre, you will need an additional place of business registered for that state as well.
- If stock sits in a fulfilment centre in another state, that state generally needs its own GST registration with that warehouse recorded as a place of business. This is why marketplace sellers often end up with several GSTINs and a return cycle per state. It is a registration question rather than an accounting one, so it is handled on the GST for e-commerce sellers page.
Not sure which one you need? Describe the problem.
Tell us where the numbers stop making sense and we will point you at the right service — or tell you that you do not need one yet.