By Arvind Modi
Does everyone feel that Modi broke the backbone of the Indian economy by introducing demonetization, GST, and RERA?
I am an IT Project manager who quit a full time job to pursue my dreams as an entrepreneur. 90 out of 100 times I use auto correct to fix the spelling of entrepreneur when I write. Until 2.5 years ago, I had an abnormal IT job for 10 years that never had a start time or end time and then I decided I am old enough to spread my wings and fly off to pursue my dreams considering the fact that I am already used to work for odd hours. So I did!
In 2.5 years, I had a lot of learning, a lot of departments of a company that I would never have tapped are now being managed by me. One of which is ‘purchasing’. And this is where my opinion on demonetization and GST comes from.
Until demonetization a lot of our purchases were paid through cash and never had an invoice. Our choices were limited, most of the suppliers were unregistered large volume suppliers who used every loop hole in the law, bribed officers and have been doing large volume business (in crores) without a single tax ID.
Then, Demonetization happened. The first impact was on these suppliers. It was practically impossible for us to get new currency and pay them. This is when we started scouting for suppliers who would take online payment. Now most of these suppliers have tight knit families so with the 2.5 lakh limit and 20 people in the family, it was easy for them to ask us to transfer to one of the 20 bank accounts they gave us. They were pretty smart they thought! So for the next few months after demonetization, whenever we had an order to place we would get a new account number to make a payment to.
At this stage, our suppliers list has shrunken down by 50% already.
Now eventually came GST. GST is a game changer for every business man. The VAT system was pretty simple, almost every sale we had was either 5% or 14.5% taxable. Being an online business, our data was always ready and it took us less time to report our taxes and pay them. But I knew a lot of them misused this reporting by submitting false purchases and lesser sales (for online business every single payment is to the bank account so we can not float these values).
