GST invoices for restaurants in India: what has to be on the bill

Nobody opens a restaurant because they were excited about invoice formats. But the bill is the one document that leaves your building with your GSTIN printed on it, goes into somebody's expense claim, and comes back at you three years later when a notice arrives asking why your returns and your invoice series don't reconcile.

Worth twenty minutes now. Here is what actually has to be on it.

First: which rate are you actually on?

There are three situations, and a surprising number of restaurants are unsure which one they're in.

The ordinary case, 5% without input tax credit. A standalone restaurant — your own premises, not inside a hotel — charges 5% GST on food and beverage service, printed as 2.5% CGST and 2.5% SGST. The catch that trips people up is the second half: you cannot claim input tax credit on what you buy. The GST on your rent, your equipment, your packaging, your aggregator commission — none of it comes back. It's a cost, and it belongs in your dish costing rather than in a credit ledger.

Inside a hotel above the tariff threshold, 18% with input tax credit. If your restaurant sits in a hotel whose declared room tariff crosses the "specified premises" threshold, you charge 18% and you do get input credit. The threshold has been revised since GST came in, and the way a property is classified has changed with it, so this is exactly the point to check the current position rather than trusting a rate somebody set in your POS in 2019.

Composition scheme, 5% paid out of your own pocket. Small restaurants under the turnover limit can opt for composition. You pay a flat rate on turnover, you cannot collect GST from the diner at all, and you issue a bill of supply rather than a tax invoice. That document has to carry the words saying you are not eligible to collect tax on supplies. A composition restaurant printing "CGST 2.5%" on its bills is collecting tax it has no authority to collect, which is a considerably more serious problem than a formatting slip.

Alcohol never entered GST. It sits outside, under state excise and VAT, and it needs its own line with its own rate — not folded into the 5%.

That last one causes real trouble in bars and restaurants that serve both. Food and non-alcoholic beverages go through GST. Liquor goes through the state VAT regime. One bill, two tax systems, two separate subtotals. Software that only understands a single tax rate will quietly produce wrong bills every night until somebody notices.

The fields a tax invoice legally needs

Print this list and hold your current bill next to it.

The two that matter most in practice are the tax split and the recipient details, because those are the ones that make a bill unusable for the person holding it.

A combined "GST ₹112.50" line looks tidier and is worth nothing to a corporate diner filing an expense claim. It has to read as 2.5% CGST ₹56.25 and 2.5% SGST ₹56.25. Two lines, always.

The B2B bill, and the ₹50,000 line

Most of your covers are walk-in diners who want a bill for their own records and nothing more. Two cases need extra fields.

A registered business is paying. The company dinner, the office lunch order, the corporate account. Their GSTIN has to be on the invoice, along with their name and address, or they cannot claim credit for it. This is the single most common reason a diner comes back to the counter irritated after the card has already gone through — and reissuing a numbered invoice after the fact is a mess you don't want during a Friday service. Ask before you print, not after.

An unregistered recipient, above ₹50,000. A large private party, a bulk order. Once the invoice value crosses that mark, you need the recipient's name, address, the address of delivery, and the state along with its code, even though they have no GSTIN. Below it, a simple bill is fine.

Numbering: the part that quietly goes wrong

Invoice numbering sounds like an administrative detail until it becomes the thing that's hard to explain.

The rule is that the series must be consecutive, unique within the financial year, no longer than sixteen characters, and built from letters, numbers, hyphens and slashes only. Restarting at 1 on the first of April is expected and correct. What you cannot have is gaps, duplicates, or numbers issued out of order.

All three happen constantly, and almost always for the same reason: the number is generated on the device that prints the bill. Two tablets on the floor, both offline for a minute, both confident they're issuing INV-0412. Or a bill gets cancelled and the number is silently reused. Or the till is replaced and the series restarts mid-year.

The fix is architectural rather than procedural. The number has to be issued by one authority — a server, a counter that only ever moves forward — and the device that prints has to ask for it rather than compute it. Then a cancelled bill leaves a cancelled number in the series, which is exactly what you want it to do. A gap you can explain is fine. A duplicate is not.

• One counter, server-side. Never per-device, never derived from a timestamp.
• Cancellations keep their number. Void it, record why, don't reuse it.
• Amendments become credit notes. Don't edit an issued invoice; issue a credit note that references it.
• One prefix per registration. If you run two GSTINs, two entirely separate series.

E-invoicing: does it apply to you?

E-invoicing means uploading B2B invoices to the government portal and getting back an IRN and a QR code that must then appear on the invoice. It applies once your aggregate annual turnover crosses a threshold, and that threshold has come down in stages since it was introduced.

Two things to hold on to. It applies to B2B supplies, so an ordinary walk-in diner's bill is not affected regardless of your turnover. And the threshold is turnover across your whole PAN, not per outlet — three modest restaurants under one registration can cross it while none of them feels large. If you're anywhere near the current limit, that's a conversation with your CA this month rather than next year.

Five mistakes worth checking for tonight

Pull your last printed bill and look for these.

The fifth: a discount applied after tax instead of before. Discounts reduce the taxable value if they're given at the time of supply and shown on the invoice.

That last one about input credit is worth dwelling on, because it's the expensive mistake rather than the embarrassing one. If you're on 5% as a standalone restaurant, the GST you pay on rent, equipment and commission is a cost. Claiming it as credit builds up a liability with interest attached that surfaces at assessment. Plenty of owners have done this for years on the strength of advice from someone at a supplier's counter.

Service charge, while we're here

Not a tax question, but it arrives on the same piece of paper. Service charge is a restaurant's own levy, not a government one, and consumer authorities in India have been clear that it cannot be added automatically or made compulsory. If you levy it, it has to be optional and the diner has to be able to decline it without an argument at the counter.

Where it does interact with GST: a service charge you collect is part of the value of your supply, so it goes into the taxable value before tax is computed — not tacked on after the tax line. A bill that computes 5% on the food subtotal and then adds 10% service charge underneath is under-charging tax and over-charging the diner in the same breath.

Getting it right without thinking about it

All of this is a solved problem the moment the billing system knows three things: which rate applies to your premises, that alcohol is a separate regime, and that invoice numbers come from one place rather than from whichever device happens to be printing.

Everything else follows. The SAC code, the tax split, the recipient fields when somebody asks for a GST bill, the credit note when a bill has to be corrected — those are template decisions you make once.

RatingEcho's billing issues GST-compliant tax invoices with the CGST and SGST split, the restaurant SAC code, and optional recipient details for B2B and high-value bills. Invoice numbers are issued by the server on a single forward-only counter, so two tablets on the floor cannot produce the same number and a cancelled bill keeps its place in the series. GST fields only appear for Indian venues — it isn't imposed on restaurants in countries where it means nothing.