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E invoice format for Building services

[Music] let's move on to the next panel discussion uh which will be about uh building the ultimate e-invoicing strategy for your business i would like to introduce our panelists first up we have it as amit prabhu who's a chief financial officer at puma india he's a charter accountant by education he has over 15 years of experience in handling finance logistics regulatory and compliance issues in the retail in consumer industry welcome amit next uh we have sachin pugnani the transformation business development who's head of transformation business development at aws hi sachin he's the alumnus of pittsburgh he has around 13 years of experience in adding teams involved in delivery data analytics and cloud-based enterprise solutions prior to aws he has worked with firms like ericsson and samsung india welcome sachin our third panelist is chief business officer clear tax before joining the clear tax team rohit has worked with firms like mckinsey and company and icici he is he is also a watson school alumnus and obviously he's done his mba degree there welcome rohit how are you guys all good right it's a very important that we are talking about today you know invoicing requires a strategy for a business and i i want to start off with amit amit a large company when it onboards something like a gst and e invoicing right what are some of the challenges of what are some of the i.t requirements that one has to look at because i see a whole lot of unorganized businesses out there who are yet to get into invoicing they may be doing 50 crore plus revenues from a puma india standpoint of view right as a cfo what challenges did you see did you see an integration of i.t and finance together how did it go on for you yeah hey uh thanks vishal and welcome to welcome thanks for the time so uh good question michelle so in terms of how something like espn or something like invoicing gets embedded into the whole finance as well as supply chain for a large enterprise so i think uh the first point is i think a lot of these changes can be disruptive if you don't plan it well and i think the rollout has to have adequate time frame maybe you have to plan it in advance to ensure that on that certain date you have not only rolling out smoothly but you tested and uh but there are a lot of parts of the business that can get affected if it's not smooth enough now one big challenge for large enterprises especially in the multinational spaces you work on uh large erps which are not just implemented in india but probably you're using the similarities as well and changes that are done locally may impact some other part of the same business okay or it may impact some other geography depending on how the architecture works so it's always a bit of a challenge to make changes and if you are using legacy systems then it can be a lot more challenging you know trying to tweak certain things and that's where i think you need to have a strategy around whether you want to do it yourself whether [Music] the key word there is strategy you worked with a lot of businesses and you know clear tax works with some of the large businesses too what are some of the strategies that you see what do they blend an i.t organization with the finance organization while implementing a e-invoicing strategy yeah uh uh thank you vishal for having me and and uh you know um a pleasure to talk about things that we are very passionate about so uh so i think what uh i think amit was mentioning uh very rightly that see the key difference between uh gst and and invoicing the invoicing is real right because it is a real-time system the uh the the latency everything from a latency to uh the reliability needs to be very very high right and this is fundamentally sitting on top of systems which are you know being implemented in phases and and so on and so forth so uh so it has a potential to disrupt a lot if you are not very careful with the implementation the other problem uh that uh i think i'm also pointed out too is that especially for mncs right and i would say not actually it's not just seven seas it's for any company with the reasonably large complexity they have multiple systems right so we have companies which have done multiple acquisitions and they have like everything from tally to sap hana to like some custom erp and so on and so forth and to the government it's it's one entity right so it's taking all of that various operational data right massaging it in the right way and then putting it into the government systems right and that's the only thing that the government systems care about that i need these 20 things you give me these 20 things right so it's a lot of i would say uh effort that is required and and what we are trying to do towards that is uh build a see theoretically it is possible right theoretically anybody can connect to the government system uh you know themselves and and do it but in in reality what happens is if your if you take that call you better be like that be one of your core strengths if it's not your core strengths what happens as a result vishal is like the escalations in gst versus escalations and invoicing are very different right you you get escalation saying you know my trucks are not working anymore right because now e-way bill is tied to invoicing and if your invoicing goes down then billing goes out right and if sometimes what happens is if the billing goes down then the goods are not leaving the warehouse if goods are not leaving the warehouse the goods that are coming into the warehouse get stuck so what you have to do is whichever way you have to have a very high reliability system right and then the other thing that you have to figure out is how do you take your existing system and put a layer on top which is also intelligent because if you are just taking all your operational data which by the way keeps changing right there's like all these complications around you know credit notes debit notes and whatnot and you keep dumping it in the in the government system government system holds latency only for 24 hours right after that it is not retrievable whatever you have uploaded it's gone or 24 or 48 hours you know maybe they'll change or whatever so you have to have uh you know various levels of complexity because it's a real time uh right so it impacts your business and and b um you know it it has implications across multiple departments so the three departments that we see working very closely again depends on the complexity of the business uh finance i.t and supply chain right uh including uh the warehousing and so i think all these departments are required and you need to create a system where all of them can talk i'm glad sachin's part of this because he's part of the transformation business development group right at aws it's very interesting uh business transformation goes well with gst transformation right so uh i wanted your views and i t requirements with most of the unorganized businesses uh you know to study invoicing need to think of an i.t strategy also i mean perhaps you can add to these views too right when this transformation happens the other id team coming saying things the finance team also has to agree to it in a way so your views on this sachin what what are the i.t requirements that uh small businesses have to set up before they go forward in the invoicing and i'll just uh start from the base actually that rohit setup see the requirement of the high availability and the robustness of the system just one point adding on top of that is the uh the spike and the volume that is being generated because it's a real time system so many people sending the transactions so uh the people who are very well organized they know they have the erps of saps or oracles or the other erps but the people who are not organized or who are just starting and do not have erps they should be part of that api economy that means their systems whatever they are developing because the organized systems are already api driven but the systems which are not api driven or not well organized uh the api mechanism should must come should be there so one api we are talking about second is maybe some other integration very standard mechanisms uh those must be in place right also highlighted that the systems do exist the uh smooth and the smooth selling comes from the uh well integration part so be the financial systems beat the i.t systems or be it the systems on the gsp side they must well integrate together and for the people who are coming out new the api mechanism and the integration mechanisms are very very critical okay interesting amit amit would you look at transformation like that within puma india uh is that how it started out for you i mean you have vast experience of this you tell me how do you integrate the two yeah i think what to add to what rohit said you know it's not just about having different applications across to acquisitions even within an organization there are different parts of it which probably uses different technology uh take a case a point you know the the software that's used at the warehouse could be very different from the software that's used at a point of sales system in a retail environment it's still part of the same company right and if you need to do some sort of a business business transaction from a retail outlet so that also needs to come within the invoicing scope so some of these transformations are actually very very difficult because they are not envisaged in the first instance and some of the software may not support uh such an integration directly so to add to what we said you the better strategy here would be not to tweak your existing system but to use that data and uh use a system in between software and technique that can prove this data and send it to the comments because the other other portion that we see is you know do we really have the bandwidth or the time to constantly change our system to you know mirror what the comic book will speak that's not a core job okay interesting i like what sachin said also you need to have highly scalable businesses but if businesses are watching this by id scalable he means the cloud right absolutely because you don't have to set up anything physical in your centers if you are thinking like that it's a wrong strategy the cloud is here to stay so rohit you would agree with the thought that one is okay that you need to look at a highly scalable infrastructure right from there begins how you're going to roll it out across across your value chain right right yeah so i think uh see at this point of time uh vishal what we realize is that in the market there are uh a certain i think they're two or three sentiments prevailing right this this there's one sentiment which which says that okay hey these things are a pain you know you know the other other thing is that hey i i am used to a legacy system an old school system in whichever they perform and so on right see i think in india whether we like it or not right i mean we we know how we were as a country five years ten years back right i mean it was a very low uh you know tax compliance and so on it was very weak which is why we have swung i think to the other side a little bit now so i think the sooner we accept that compliance is around us and if you want to build a scalable business right without proper compliances in place it's going to be hard that's number one and number two is uh technology is all around us now right and the old way of doing technology without cloud right is is i mean at this point of time it it almost feels like you know i like i was reading the report i mean even cia is giving out like you know uh kind of uh they're using right so so at this point of time it's only our uh i would say old perceptions which keep us away from cutting-edge cloud solutions the third thing as i think uh i think amit was mentioning sometime back right is the nature of see the government itself is acting like a startup now right what i mean by that is their rollouts are very very fast right and and literally like like when when they did the october rollout of invoicing i remember like our team was online at like 11 45 pm for at 12 o'clock they sent out the final notification so the government is acting actually with very high agency and very high dedication in the kovidia right so now when things are changing so fast if you do not have a cloud-based solution right i mean then you better have a team which is like you know then i t is like your deep deep core capability otherwise you're just going to struggle right and i think thankfully i mean we have multiple kind of participants here there i think the ecosystem has now learned how to play right so for the things that we need we use aws right because everybody needs high degree of assurance high degree of latency and so on and so forth or low latency or whatnot so i think uh it's just extremely critical that we think about it and we just accept that these realities are here to stay the other thing i want to mention is that see it's much like i think uh you know like you know the internal comparison that we make is upi for consumers invoicing for businesses right effectively it is as transformative right and india is the 50th country going live or 50 second country whatever going live from invoicing standpoint what we have seen in countries like brazil turkey and whatnot right is in a five seven year period right like somewhere between eighty percent hundred percent of invoices are going to be digital right so i think you know it's at some level you know we can we can talk about the government and the pace at which they're implementing or and so on so forth but i think if you look at the broader thing right this is the tool which is forcing a lot of people to get digitized for the first time and their lives actually when you fast forwarded to three years out will actually be very different so there will be a set of people who will see that hey let me do this and then 10 other things get solved for me which otherwise i was not doing you know all you can resist right so the choices up to the customer right like you know you can do it in whichever way but there are huge dividends in our opinion that will be realized for the people who actually accept it and and try to see what else can be done with it okay great now i want to get into the diagnosis of this okay let's all i mean we are not the pinata here of course but let's diagnose the challenges what are i mean i we have amity rose from a business we've got roy from clear tax who can actually end and obviously such an aws more technology and you know uh understanding of the taxes point of view clear tax allows you to do that amit from what are the four or five challenges that smbs are large businesses and face roy i want you to tell them how you can get rid of these challenges right because the the audience out here are these uh businesses that have not yet become compliant with gst and and sachin you could perhaps tell us okay knowing what the business is doing are doing this is what aws can offer you to scale up you know faster perhaps you could take your product to national or global markets faster right something like that i'm with over to you let's start with you what are the four or five simple problems and how do you address them and then we'll move to growth and such increase okay so i mean uh securely from a rollout point of view in compliance with invoicing i think uh first of [Music] make sure that it integrates well with the entire gst ecosystem okay so now that's a much bigger one where you're able to file your taxes also online that you have to export later on let's get that one one big challenge that currently was important for me from time to time is the lag on the bomb inside you know i think for this yesterday i saw some messages in one of the groups that the server was not working okay and uh just this morning or sorry for some couple of minutes from there so i think that is something that i think environment needs to address you know that because the the impact of that is huge if you're not able to connect to the site if you're not able to get the information back you're not able to generate a qr you know you are actually installing uh the entire movement out of the wells okay or any of these and for time mount uh services and goods which are dependent on this you know where the invoice generation has to happen instantaneously there i think this can be a big challenge to us so i think that's something that and more importantly i think you need to uh from a secure supply chain point of view i think it is about uh making sure that your processes are very very tight okay uh historically we have had certain concepts in india you know where you sort of build and dispatch later and some of them i think those those lags have to go right it's now about tightening your belt and making sure you are on the ball i think that that's that's different so internally i think you need to re-look at a structure what you will do [Music] yeah that's phenomenal right i i like the early point that you made that uh with if you look at the 50 crore underground companies uh 50 of them have already moved there right there's another 50 that's a laggard for many reasons right and and like i would mention the real lining the strategy part of it sometimes also you know these are founder-run companies i think the founders should get aligned to this right they should say this is how i'm going to transform myself right over to you no 100 agree uh vishal in fact uh again right i mean there's there's no monolith out there right so we see we deal with companies of all sizes uh right that's how the clear tax is designed uh and and we play without bias with any system right so we we connect to people who have no system and they are working on our web product we connect to people who work on tally with the old versions of new version and we connect to people who are on hannah right which is not an in memory right correct right so i think uh so we get to see uh the same 50 crore company right in in two different areas are run by two different founders right uh or owners which act very very differently right so we see two distinct behavior there is one set of people who actually are telling us who are pushing us and saying hey now that i am doing this right now that you have my invoice data online which is even faster than my my sap data or my tally data now who all can see this data on their mobile phone right because now i have real time visibility into my system right so we literally have one customer who's pushing us in that direction right we have another customer who is telling us that hey it is interesting that you know now that you have both me and my distributors right can you connect us because now you know you have this whole thing called invoice which constantly bounces between me and my supplier right that hey this invoice is wrong or this po is wrong or whatnot what can you do on top of that right so i think you know it it a little bit of it is you know because it's so early right there's a set of people who are looking ahead and saying this can be extremely transformative right and there is a set of people who are still resisting it right so fundamentally speaking right it is it is much like upi in that sense in the sense that the rails are there now right now we are just an app right and our app will continue to enrich but eventually it's about the customer on what they want to how much further they want to push the other problem i'll also tell you vishal which is which we see as an emerging problem especially as invoicing is going lower uh as you may or may not be aware uh initially it was supposed to come to all hundred crore below businesses and then the government stopped it at 50 crores right correct at this point of time uh you know whether in two months three months six months whenever it will go from 50 crores to five crores right at some point of time it will go that's the distribution drop so fast correct right so then so far we've been handling roughly 50 000 companies in india in every uh every wave right next big wave will be 500 000 companies right so as i think amit also mentioned there are uptime issues and so on there are certain issues which we are trying to address like we can only communicate right to the customer that hey there are government systems are down we are doing the best that we can but government systems are down please you know relax and you know save your coffee or whatever right but government is also that's why government is doing it in stages and i actually applaud them that they didn't do it like they did gst when it was a big shock right so invoicing despite all said and done right it has not caused meltdown in the right you don't see like dharnas on the street because of invoicing right as as we did for gst and the bigger problem that i see coming will be that see the government has already made it very clear gstn has that if you don't generate invoicing then your e-way bill cannot be generated if you don't have your e-way bill then your trucks cannot move now what happens is a large company which is themselves ready but if their ecosystem is not ready right they are gonna face problems because then they are dealing with non-compliant people which is no fun yeah right so i think that's where it is going now every ecosystem right and that's how government is actually designed very very well the government is saying hey i've got puma online okay now puma will force their own counterparts from the supplier or on the distributor side they will force them into becoming compliant as well so in in that sense i think it's uh it's actually the design is beautiful right i mean the implementation could be maybe a little bit better or whatever but the design i see is you know quite i'm glad you said that because if jst was a person right there are no dharnas happening on the street so that's a good test of character for the gst but people haven't come out and protested that's a great uh point of view from there and and you know no such your point of view right say all the businesses say i'm a founder i've got a 50 crore business okay i go into the cloud aws cloud right and you know i start finding my invoices you mentioned highly scalable what are some of those challenges from a technology stand point of view because i as a founder will think that because i'm in aws you know there won't be any problems or glitches right so how do i combine the best of the applications like rohit said right if i have a clear tax also as a solution right how do i make sure that you know i'm able to scale up as my transactions start coming in as i increase my transaction from all my vendors so one point as you said like the scale-up part and second is like scale up without any loss of uh i mean keeping it highly available without any loss of uh downtime or without having loss of uptime basically so in aws we say that the slas and the the guarantees that we say they are extremely high plus at the same time uh the newer technology architectures as we call we typically call them active active that means uh in the olden time older conventional ways people were creating the architectures where they said okay if my main architecture or main data center is running and if it goes down i should have a second one uh and then there are some lags to cover before the second one comes up in aws we say that we have an active active architecture that means uh both these systems run i mean multiple systems run together serve the customers and when uh i mean if there is a hiccup because eventually it's a machine i mean if something goes down there are one both the machines say for example are running so they give back up to each other so this brings up extremely high sme so this is one part second part from the operational standpoint when people say that if you're going to set up something you need to meet certain compliances so if you uh the highest number of compliances that aws comes up with you need not worry about that so uh just if the business actually uh is a supply chain business they are exporting their own domain retail businesses are expert in their own domain so when it comes to the it sla management i.t uptime management compliance management this is an ongoing activity and we call it as an undifferentiated activity uh the people rather than doing those undifferentiated works they can focus on their own domain so people who are in the supply chain they can focus on their application meet their customers commitment meet their customers slas without worrying about the slash done uh another important point is like how fast you can manage the change and uh these days businesses are adopting the new ways like machine learning artificial intelligence so if you want to set it up at your own place setting up the underlying i.t infra plus the entire technical stack it's quite complex while when you come to the aws the broadest array of services as we call so from typical compute storage to the automation change management to machine learning everything comes under at one place for you if you want to innovate if you want to adopt something it's right available there for you you just need your domain knowledge and undifferentiated work as we say is already done okay do i need to employ a i.t person if i'm uh if i'm implementing gst do or amit this question to you do you have to have a special i.t person under the finance team just to allow you to integrate with the gst better the reason i also asked this is because you may be in the best of the cloud right best of the cloud best application but then like rohit said if the jsc system is down i i mean there's nothing like who takes cognizance of that fact right you guys will still be penalized for late filing yeah in this case uh i mean obviously the business takes ahead because you're not able to dispatch okay and the penalties could be very stiff if you uh are invoicing without the iron and that you are on the invoice so yes i think uh there is that uh there are those challenges but i think those challenges will be sorted i think every single day sometimes will stabilize and uh i mean let's be honest with you the system that we went within our own companies okay they do not work uh like first instance and that's true for every application across every company in the world i think initial robots will have income which can refer to an upgradation cycle so i think that's fairly well understood and as business i think we are working willing to work with the government on these parameters where we understand that but i think some of the other issues that i should have pointed out bringing these suppliers on board now that's a bit challenging that that are fine and again because different businesses are at different points in the digital adoption curve some may be see a way when you talk of a turnover as a parameter to the site there are industries where the turnovers could be extremely large with very small number of transactions okay and uh how will they do they really have those systems do they may not be as large they may not be able to see the margins across industries are not the same yeah right so especially if you are in trading uh commodities so then some of it could be challenging in terms of adoption of this and uh the ability to roll it out and to your real question or do you need a full-time itu person i don't think either i don't think it's again about uh figuring out what is the right strategy to uh go back to what rohit had said initially at the top of this call he said there'll always be cowboys who try to do it their own way rather than use a system that's established in the market they may have to have a fallback but otherwise i think uh what works now is working very fine okay great great point you know uh roy coming to you some color from your from the num the very number of businesses that you support right uh what type of uh solutions have you offered them what is the vision for clear tax and what is the way forward uh for the our company in helping these businesses grow uh with gst invoicing and i know amit you you guys you use cleartax so you can bring in your points too what do you wrote yeah uh so vishal i think uh the vision that we have actually starts at compliance and goes further right because when you look at government switching right government has actually come out and if you read their kind of white papers that they have put out there it's not actually compliance right they are actually compliance is one of the end goals but really they are trying to just digitize everything right which will over a longer period of time make everybody's life simpler and business easy in india right now see just like you know upi before it came and so on right like a lot of skepticism and how will it work very few people understanding now we know how easy it has made life right now that is a consumer system right therefore low complexity right this is a b2b system right so it will take probably a year or two right for this to get settled in uh now so therefore our vision uh vishal is uh first uh part of the vision is just make the absolute damn best products right uh which are required for compliance in india right so we want to make one pipe right that every business in india can use regardless of their size right should they want to be compliant and should they want a cutting-edge technology solution right if somebody does not want to be compliance we can't help them and if somebody wants to use a slightly uh outdated or old-school uh solution so be it right so our vision is first provide them a pipe that allows them to be compliant the the next thing is to make other business oriented tools right which help them in their day-to-day life right so for example you know amit would be dealing i don't know you know somewhere between like 500 and 2000 odd probably vendors right on a quarterly basis right now we want to make tools which allow uh and see how erps are designed which are they're a vertical system right they run from manufacturing through supply chain to uh you know to the shop or whatnot right we want to create a horizontal system through which amit and his vendors right can interact with each other right acknowledge each other's pos say where the payment has been made these are things that right now happen quote unquote digitally over email right but extremely efficient right so and and there is this constant you know any cfo or any uh finance guy that you see right they constantly are doing reconciliations between you know you know did i raise the requisition again especially was there a po against which there was an invoice against which there was you know a payment you know there's all this thing that they're doing so we are trying to make the tools which simplify this right and so therefore one is compliance second is allow businesses to connect with each other and resolve their issues on a common platform and common platform cannot be sap or valley or whatever because these are fundamentally different systems provide them one place where a small guy can look at an app and say okay i've sent this invoice a big guy can look on you know his sap and say okay this is done and allow them to just you know focus on their business and not on reconciliations which is you know which we want to be our business oh that's a that's a very nice answer to simply put it guys uh your margins won't be affected by this because it's going to be as simple as that right it's just a horizontal you can link in various systems your dashboards will be simple and easy to use uh wrote correct me if i'm wrong that's the future uh like amit we made a point right all the traders worry that their margins would be affected if they invest in these kind of systems but no i think your revenues will scale up faster because you're spending less time on documentation and reconciliation yeah so actually uh i think vishal it's it's about just the creative energies going towards where they should go right i mean at this point of time you know like you know you and i in our day-to-day life right like we don't try to like you know we don't grow our own vegetables right like we eat we can all theoretically do all the things right theoretically right but it is about amit should be worried about you know how do i you know grow mind to you know the biggest you know activewear whatever brand in the country or whatever right so that should be his things right so i think you know aws has to figure out about their own things how do we you know create systems that companies like cleartax and any other company can can use it so i think i think it's about focusing uh on on the key things which you are supposed to focus on and then providing uh and actually these days uh michelle i mean um see india is a very price sensitive market so therefore company that scales right whether it is aws or puma rk attacks right they know how to give efficiencies and give things where you know customer is not beyond a point you know hurt right and customers are only pay right for things which are efficient right actually price is not the issue mindset right we see as a bigger issue there will be laggards and there will be cutting edge guys right so so that's my kind of no that's a good very good you your your arguments really sound and i really enjoyed this point of view in terms of technology right i i the future these traders when they look at technology they should not be scared right you know you remember in when we were growing up i don't know how old you guys are but people said computers all the lic agents for example or the insurance agents would go and say you know computers will take away our business but actually to be honest with you all the businesses have grown you right so that way from a technology standpoint of the point of view would you say that the future is about how you leverage intelligently it's a part of your business strategy don't ignore it or to use it yeah i mean completely agree to you actually so instead of i mean people have started thinking and in fact the demands have increased so if we just look at the invoicing case so invoicing is the best solution that everybody is looking at now the demand from the consumer side or the organization organization side is like what is the top-up so how my reconciliation will happen automatically second is how my input tax credit uh will be maximized or will be rightly computed so this is the now or demand from them because they know that the underlying technology exists but how to bring it to their benefit so that is where this new technology as we talk about or new infrastructure or new machine learning new api that comes to play or maybe uh the old school verifications of the input data that i mean the invoicing information is reaching at certain place at central place maybe a clear text so they would be certainly expecting that it should be done automatically and if something is wrong be notified uh all those things so these small top-ups people have started already thinking about so they are not scared but yes demands have certainly increased okay my final question to you guys uh starting with you what does the future look like uh in this entire invoicing gst regime what is going to happen to india you're talking about ai you're talking about digital transformation all this what is going to happen with the businesses yes the businesses actually i mean i'll say these terms are now part of the business so people actually do not worry about the underlying stack as we say what is the what is the complexity uh people even the businesses now start thinking that okay i am defining a process uh what part of it will certainly be solved by the traditional systems and what part will be solved by the machine learning just taking an example uh invoicing systems we all know uh the transactions are coming up the well-defined process systems do exist but if there is any anomaly do we have a formula we don't have but people know that yes machine learning approaches do exist to solve that uh the reconciliation right now we know that there is a well-defined formula but is there a way to maximize input explanation as i was saying or is there a way to find out that how my transactions have been happening and is there any business inside automatic machine learning based in business inside for me so these are now part of regular business decisions even before the project starts so they are now integral part already i'll say okay okay amit what does the future look like from a business stand point of view okay let me just take a step back here i think why you said that you know how old you are itself was a you know a rare commodity so very clearly yeah yeah i remember yeah so very few of our clients are tally uh licensing of tally was a big challenge you know uh even if you had tally they would come and give you the printed books of accounts so it was never a question of you auditing the system it was like you are auditing the print notes that came out of them so this is the era okay at the same time uh tds back then you know tax direction so it used to be pieces of paper your form 16 and clock 16 so i have a couple of you know even dividends used to be taxed and used so with the dividend slip you should get these small pieces of paper which was no bigger than a railway ticket okay and that could be worth pros if based on what is the value of the tax deducted on that particular slip now think of that transformation now now what we have the whole dds system works on our 26 as solvers where you know exactly what the tds is and that is the portal that tells you so you're no longer depending on pieces of paper i think we are at that stage in uh in transaction taxation in india in terms of uh the way that gst is progressing we are no more dependent on paper ignorance okay yes there are issues with claiming input credits right now we are part of that you know this ecosystem that we basically studied but five years from now where we are in a much healthier way of dealing with this much better way where more people are able to understand how this works i think it will be much smoother i think uh input credits will get a lot more easier to deal with and as rohingya said we are looking at you know reconciliation is getting much smoother that the differences that exist today between organizations a and b i think it's much easier to deal with and lastly i would say is integration that's something that we're doing on the supply chain that the government is doing [Music] but i think we're going to see a lot more compliances and lot fewer avenues for tax evasion which can help us all you know both as businesses the taxes going down as well as individuals you would say embrace the change don't wait yeah so i think amit kind of uh mentioned what i was going to say right you know again at a step back level right if you look at where the indian consumer market was right in 20 years ago you know uh 2013 even i would say even six seven years ago right see we were we were laggards in terms of you know how many let's say smartphones were there and so on and so forth right so see the the the good part about india is that on many of the things you know we lag by long enough right that things become very cheap right and and once things become cheap they get adopted actually ferociously right so i think what happened in the indian consumer market between 13 14 to 19 20 right in five six years we have gone we have become you know almost at the same level and i would say because some of the government interventions and you know you know ga uh interventions we are probably leapfrogged a little bit ahead right now if you go to the u.s right actually their systems their payment systems feel very antiquated very very antiquated right uh so i think in my mind from like 2020 to 2025 is going to be that era for indian businesses right we are going to leapfrog right and and we we see a lot of these things we see a lot of these directions where the winds are blowing and i think it is going to just like in the consumer world right you know you had young kids who were adopting things fast and then you know grandfathers adopting things in like 2016-17 we have the same the businesses right who wants to be kind of mentally like a young kid and who wants to be mentally like a grandkid that difference will be there but no matter what right five years later paper will be out right if you are trying to do things on paper if you're trying to evade taxes it will be too painful right and your counterparts you know are going to shrink every day the people who are happy to do things in cash people who are happy to things you know without with paper as a primary currency that's going to disappear and the other thing i would just like to say is see what we are building right now right are the basic rails right on which you know we are one of the apps there will be 10 other apps that will come up right and for consumer right for the consumer which is the businesses in this case right i think it will unleash a series of i would say entrepreneurs who say now everything like i have a business app for everything right therefore my life is much simpler right and the other thing that in my opinion also will happen you brought up like the case of like let's say lic agents and so on so forth what we see see we we serve 60 000 cs in india right they are using our platform as well right so actually everybody is going to get on the same platform and lives will actually be very very simple and last thing i would want to mention is you know very vigorously agree with amit on the fact that you know eventually evasion is going to be you know there's a lot of people who in india do things by the book there are a lot of people who don't do things by the book right and there was always like the people who are doing things by the book they always feel like you know why do i have to do this right at somewhere in their heart they feel so now i think the the playing field is being leveled and because of that because of the tax revenues that the government should get it will actually impact all of us in a positive way so when you take a 20-year view i think it's a huge positive and yes we can fault the uh you know as i am also said you know our internal systems themselves right you try implementing a new erp in your company you know you will have much more i i can honestly tell you implementing gst you know in the country or implementing invoicing in the country has been simpler than implementing erp in a company right uh so you know so i think you know while it's good to beat up the government or whatever you know that's a national pastime but you know we should i think we should appreciate what they have actually been able to do absolutely guys that is absolutely true i mean implementing internal systems great great guys to sum up right uh these gentlemen here spoke about you know be accountable right it makes you accountable but what we also expect is an accountable government as you guys go digital your entrepreneurship abilities you'll see new age entrepreneurs scale up also so what do we expect rule of law accountability and transparency that's where india is heading and i think gst and e invoicing is on that roadmap with that uh guys we come to the end of this session about invoicing i thank our panelists for sharing their insights and i'm sure those in the audience will have a fair share of questions that have had a fair share of takeaways thank you for attending if you have any doubts questions write into us we'll write into these gentlemen and get it answered again thank you so much thank you have a good one bye [Music]