Your GST registration and GSTIN
The three registration types, what the GSTIN check catches before an invoice goes out, and the one combination the product will keep asking you about.
Three kinds of business, one setting
The business profile in the back office asks for your GST registration type, and it is the single most consequential field in the product. It decides what document your customers are handed, whether GST is charged at all, and which reminders you will ever see.
- Regular — you collect GST. Your sales documents are tax invoices.
- Composition scheme — you are registered, but you do not collect GST from the customer. Your sales documents are a bill of supply.
- Unregistered — no registration at all. Also a bill of supply.
A brand-new account starts as regular, because that is the column's default and nobody has asked you yet. If it is not what you are, change it before you print anything for a customer.
The GSTIN, and what typing it checks
A GSTIN is fifteen characters and it is not a random string. The first two are your state, the next ten are your PAN, the thirteenth counts how many registrations that PAN holds in that state, and the last is a check digit.
Because of that last character, a mistyped GSTIN can be caught the moment you enter it, with no lookup and no internet. Nearly every single-character slip and every swap of two adjacent characters is refused on the spot. This is worth more than it sounds: a wrong number on a document is usually discovered months later by an accountant, as a credit somebody could not claim.
The field is checked for shape and check digit when you save. Nothing is fetched, nothing is verified against a portal, and a number that passes the check is not thereby proved to belong to you — it is proved to be a well-formed number.
The one combination that gets chased
If your registration type is regular and there is no GSTIN on record, or the one on record does not pass the check, you are charging GST on tax invoices with no number to remit it against. That is what the compliance notice on the dashboard and the row on the setup list are about, and it is the only GSTIN state either of them raises.
They are the same rule read twice, on purpose — the two surfaces used to disagree, and a composition dealer could be reassured by one and nagged by the other on the same afternoon.
If you are on the composition scheme
Neither surface will chase you for a GSTIN, because you are compliant without one on this list. The document is a different question: where the rules require your number on a bill of supply, it belongs there, so enter it anyway. Only the nagging is switched off, not the requirement.
If you are unregistered there is nothing to enter, and the field says so.
PAN, FSSAI and outlets
Your PAN sits beside the GSTIN and is worth filling in whichever type you are — composition and unregistered businesses have one even without a GSTIN. The FSSAI licence is fourteen digits and optional here.
One thing to watch if you run more than one kitchen: each outlet carries its own profile. Fixing the registration on one does not fix another, and the dashboard notice reports the first outlet with a problem — so clearing it once may simply reveal the next.