As 2025 closes, the compliance landscape under GST has shifted significantly from return-filing reforms to stricter invoice controls, e-way bill timelines, and systemic ITC safeguards. For finance teams, the difference between a clean audit and a penalty rests on proactive checks, timely filings and updated processes. Below is a detailed checklist with context, deadlines and action items to help you close the year with confidence.
Why This Checklist Matters (Overall Impact)
- Avoid Penalties & Late Fees: With locked returns, time-bars and automatic late-fee computation, delays or errors can lead to unavoidable financial impact.
- Secure ITC and Prevent Credit Rejections: IMS-based invoice acceptance and e-way bill/e-invoice compliance ensure that input credits don’t get blocked during audit.
- Ensure Smooth Operations & Supply-Chain Flow: Logistics, procurement and billing teams working with updated SOPs prevents shipment delays, compliance breaches or tax disputes.
- Facilitate Audit-Ready Documentation: A clean, system-driven record trail (invoices, e-way bills, portal screenshots, IMS logs) helps during internal or external audits and reduces risk.
- Build Compliance Discipline & Governance: End-of-year discipline ensures monthly/quarterly routines remain strong, reducing rush-filing, errors and last-minute compliance stress in future years.
By proactively following this year-end GST compliance checklist, finance teams can close 2025 with confidence, ensuring accurate returns, secured ITC, and smooth operations. Staying organized, updating systems, and maintaining proper documentation not only prevents penalties but also strengthens internal controls, setting a solid foundation for seamless compliance in 2026.
Do you know about IRIS GST software solution
It’s a GST Software trusted by top Indian companies! A cloud-based GST software that helps you to automate your GST Return filing, optimise Reconciliation results and increase ITC claim without any hassle. It’s a powerful GST Return filing that supports multiple GST Return filing, PAN level data view, bulk operations, advanced 2A-Purchase Register reconciliation tool, vendor management and gets you 100 % ITC Claims.
How does IRIS GST Software help with GSTR 9?
- One-click download of GSTR 1, 2A, 2B and 3B data
- IMS
- Reports on Tables 6, 10, 11, 13, 17 and 18 helps in auto-population
- In-built audit trail at an invoice level for each entry (Invoice-wise, month-wise and section-wise bifurcation of all values)
- One-click GSTR-9 data upload for all GSTINs
- Need not wait for year-end, you can get all reports at the end of any month
- A checklist of periods for which you have fetched data from GSTN. This is available return-wise for GSTR 1, 2A and 3B
- Comparison between IRIS auto-calculated data and GSTN auto-calculated data
- Quick reports on differences between table 8 of GSTR 9 vs GSTR 2a vs GSTR 2B vs Purchase Register
IRIS GST Software’s GST Reconciliation module has been built considering the requirements of various industries such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, automobiles etc., and has market-tested logic to reconcile the buyer-supplier data across various parameters to reduce manual intervention.