You've Got Your GSTIN. What Happens in the First 30 Days?

Getting your GSTIN feels like the finish line. It is actually the starting gun: from the date of registration you have filing obligations, invoicing rules, and a few deadlines that are easy to miss because nobody tells you about them.

1. Fix Your Invoice Format

A registered business issues a tax invoice, and it has a required shape: your GSTIN, a consecutive serial number, the customer's GSTIN where they have one, HSN or SAC codes, taxable value, and the tax split shown separately as CGST and SGST, or IGST for inter-state.

Get this right immediately. Reissuing three months of invoices because the format was wrong is miserable work, and your customers cannot claim input tax credit on a defective invoice.

2. Display the GSTIN at Your Place of Business

Your registration certificate has to be displayed prominently at your principal place of business, and the GSTIN shown on the name board at the entrance. It is a small thing that inspectors do check.

3. Add Your Bank Account Details

This is the one people miss. Bank account details have to be furnished on the portal within 45 days of registration, or by the due date of your first return, whichever comes first. Miss it and your registration can be suspended, which is a far bigger problem than the two minutes it takes to comply.

4. File Your First Return, Even If It Is Nil

The first return catches out businesses who registered early and have not yet traded. A nil return is still a return. Late fees accrue on nil filings exactly as they do on active ones, and there is no grace period for being new.

5. Decide on QRMP Straight Away

If your turnover is within the limit, the Quarterly Return Monthly Payment scheme lets you file GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B quarterly while paying monthly. For a small business that is a meaningful reduction in filing work. Decide early, because switching schemes mid-year is more disruptive than starting on the right one.

6. Sort Out E-Way Bills Before Your First Big Dispatch

If you move goods worth more than ₹50,000, you need an e-way bill. Register on the portal and set up sub-users for whoever actually does your dispatch, before a consignment is sitting on a lorry waiting for paperwork.

What Nobody Tells You

Your first three months set the pattern. Businesses that reconcile from month one rarely have trouble later; those that treat GST as a year-end problem discover in month nine that their books and their filed returns disagree, and by then the fix is expensive.

Want the first year handled properly? See our GST return filing plans, or read up on ongoing GST compliance.