Your GST credit isn't automatic anymore — it depends on a button you may never have clicked

For as long as GST has existed, input tax credit worked the same way in every business owner's head: you receive a genuine invoice, you record it in your purchase register, and you claim the tax on it. What your supplier did with their own return was, at most, background noise. That assumption stopped being true — quietly, over several advisories since October 2024 — and most small businesses in Surat have not yet adjusted to it.

The GST portal now runs a screen called the Invoice Management System (IMS) between your supplier's return and yours. Every invoice, debit note and credit note your supplier saves or files in their GSTR-1 or IFF lands on your IMS dashboard first. Your credit does not come from your books any more. It comes from what you did — or did not do — with that screen.

What actually sits on your IMS dashboard

Think of IMS as a gatekeeper between your supplier's sales and your GSTR-2B. For every record on it you have three choices: Accept it (it counts as your ITC), Reject it (it does not), or mark it Pending (decide later). A Surat embroidery unit buying thread, sequins and grey fabric from a dozen small job-workers and traders every month will typically see fifteen to twenty such records appear over the course of a month — most correct, a few not.

Example: a job-worker supplies sequins worth ₹1.8 lakh in July and files the invoice against the unit's GSTIN. Within a day or two, that invoice is sitting on the embroidery unit's IMS dashboard, tagged with the supplier's GSTIN, invoice number and tax amount — waiting for a decision the accounts team may not even know it needs to make.

Doing nothing is a decision now

Here is the change that catches most people out: an un-actioned invoice is not held in limbo. It is deemed accepted. If nobody opens IMS all month, every invoice sitting there — correct or not — flows straight into the draft GSTR-2B and from there into GSTR-3B as claimed credit.

The portal no longer asks whether you claimed the credit correctly. It asks whether you clicked.

This cuts both ways. A supplier who wrongly charges CGST and SGST on what should have been an inter-state IGST invoice, or bills against a cancelled GSTIN, is deemed accepted along with everything genuine — and that credit now sits in your books until an assessing officer questions it, at which point reversing it costs interest under section 50, not just the tax. Equally, a genuine invoice nobody got around to accepting still flows through automatically, so IMS has not made bookkeeping optional — it has just moved the point of failure from "did we record it" to "did anyone look at the screen."

Reject and Pending do less than they sound like

Rejecting a record in IMS keeps it out of your GSTR-2B — full stop, no ITC. It does not cancel the invoice with your supplier, and it does not touch their liability, which they have already reported. To fix the underlying invoice, your supplier has to amend it through GSTR-1A before they file, and you then action the corrected record when it reappears.

Pending looks like a safe middle option, and for ordinary invoices it is — you can leave a record pending indefinitely while you chase the supplier. Credit notes and downward amendments are the exception: under GSTN's October 2025 advisory, these can be kept pending for only one tax period. Miss that window and the system forces the record through as accepted, along with whatever ITC reversal the credit note implies.

The monthly clock most businesses ignore

The date that matters is not the 20th, when GSTR-3B is due. It is the 14th, when the portal drafts your GSTR-2B from whatever IMS actions exist at that point.

You can still act on IMS after the 14th — right up to the moment you file GSTR-3B — but every fresh action after the draft is generated needs a manual "Recompute GSTR-2B" click on the portal to reflect in your return. Skip that step and your filed return will not match what you actually decided in IMS. And once GSTR-3B is filed for a period, IMS actions for that period freeze permanently. There is no post-filing correction the way there sometimes used to be, when everything was typed by hand into Table 4.

Your own sales are already in the same position

This discipline is not one-sided. Since Advisory No. 606 (7 June 2025), Table 3 of your own GSTR-3B — the outward liability figures pulled from your GSTR-1, GSTR-1A or IFF — has been non-editable on the portal from the July 2025 tax period onward. If your accounts team billed the wrong GSTIN or the wrong rate, there is no field left inside GSTR-3B to quietly fix it in. The only route is a GSTR-1A amendment before you file — exactly the same discipline IMS now demands of you as a buyer.

GST's ITC field (Table 4) has not been locked the same way yet, but the direction is unmistakable — every change since October 2024 has moved manual editing out of GSTR-3B and into IMS and GSTR-1A, upstream of it. Treat this year's filings as if that lock has already arrived, because the correction window keeps shrinking either way.

A five-minute habit that avoids most of this

The businesses that stay ahead of IMS are not doing anything clever — they are just opening the dashboard on a fixed day each week, before the 14th, rather than once a quarter when something has already gone wrong. Reject what is clearly not yours, chase suppliers on anything genuinely disputed, and never let a credit note sit unactioned into a second tax period.

Sources

This article is general information, not professional advice. Rules change; verify current provisions or contact the office for advice on your situation.