GST for stone businesses: a plain guide

This is a plain-language explainer, not tax advice. Rates, thresholds, and rules change, and your situation is specific. Confirm everything with your accountant or a qualified professional before you rely on it. What follows is how GST invoicing generally works for a stone yard, in ordinary language.

GST turned invoicing from a receipt into a compliance document. For a busy yard, that's a headache exactly when you're least free to deal with it — at the moment stone is leaving. Understanding the few moving parts makes it far less daunting.

The HSN code

Every item on a GST invoice carries an HSN code — a classification number that tells the tax system what you sold. Worked dimensional stone (cut, dressed slabs and the like) generally falls under HSN 6802. Getting the code right matters because it ties to the applicable rate; getting it consistently right across every invoice matters even more.

The tax split: CGST/SGST or IGST

This is the part that trips people up, and it comes down to one question: where is the sale going?

• Within your state (intra-state): the tax is split into two halves — CGST (central) and SGST (state). Same total, two lines.
• To another state (inter-state): it's a single IGST line for the full amount.

What decides it is the place of supply — essentially, where the goods are headed. Get the place of supply right and the split follows automatically. Get it wrong and you have a compliance problem to unwind later.

One subtlety worth knowing: when tax is split into two halves, the halves must add back exactly to the total, to the paisa. Careless rounding creates invoices that don't reconcile — a small thing that causes real friction at filing time.

What makes an invoice compliant

Beyond the tax maths, a proper tax invoice generally needs: your GSTIN and your buyer's, the place of supply, the HSN code, a clear line-item breakdown, the tax split, and the total — often with the amount written out in words (in the Indian lakh/crore convention). It should carry a sequential invoice number, and it should be a document you can reproduce for an auditor months later.

Why "at sale time" beats "at filing time"

The most common failure isn't getting the maths wrong — it's leaving it all to month-end. Invoices assembled from slips and memory at filing time are where errors creep in and hours disappear.

The healthier discipline is to generate each invoice correctly, at the moment of sale: the split computed from the place of supply, the HSN attached, the number sequential, the words spelled out — done once, done right, retrievable forever. Your accountant then works from clean, correct documents instead of reconstructing them.

What software does and doesn't do here

Tools that generate GST invoices (ShilaTeq among them) handle the mechanical parts — the split, the HSN, the amount-in-words, the sequential numbering, a reprintable document. What they don't do is replace your accountant or your judgment about your specific obligations, thresholds, and any e-invoicing or e-way-bill requirements that apply to your turnover. Use the tool for the mechanics; use your accountant for the certainty.