TCS reconciliation, from settlement to GSTR.

There are two numbers that ought to be identical: the TCS a marketplace deducted from your settlements, and the TCS credited against your GSTIN on the GST portal. TCS reconciliation is the simple, unglamorous act of confirming they are — and finding out early when they are not.

The two numbers that must agree

When a marketplace collects TCS on your sales, it records that on the collection side — in your settlement statements and, formally, in its GSTR-8 filing. That filing is supposed to flow through to the credit side — your GSTR-2A on the GST portal and, once accepted, your electronic cash ledger. Reconciliation is checking that the collection side and the credit side carry the same figure. If they do, your credit is intact. If they do not, you have found something worth fixing.

This sits directly on top of the wider job of claiming your TCS credit: you cannot confidently claim a credit you have not confirmed is fully there. And because the source documents overlap, it dovetails with payout reconciliation — the same settlement reports feed both.

Why collected and credited drift apart

In a perfect month the two numbers match to the rupee. Real months are messier. Timing is the biggest culprit: a marketplace may file late, so TCS collected in one period reflects as credit in the next. Returns and adjustments processed in different cycles shift the net taxable value the TCS is based on. A GSTIN mismatch — the wrong registration on a listing or account — can misdirect a credit entirely. And on your side, a missed settlement in your own totals makes the collected figure look smaller than it was. None of these are catastrophes if caught monthly; all of them compound if left to year-end.

The reports you need

The reconciliation runs on two sources. From the marketplace: the TCS or settlement statement showing what it collected across AJIO, Meesho and Amazon. From the GST portal: your GSTR-2A (which reflects each marketplace’s GSTR-8) and your electronic cash ledger. Line the collected figure up against the credited figure, period by period, and the gaps — if any — reveal themselves. If you also build your outward return from marketplace data, our guide on building GSTR-1 from marketplace reports keeps the whole return consistent, and the broader GST for marketplace sellers overview sets the context.

A monthly routine that holds

The routine is short and repeatable. Each month, once settlements and portal data are available: gather the TCS collected per marketplace, pull the TCS credited from GSTR-2A, match them, and note any difference to a cause — timing, adjustment, mismatch, or a settlement you had missed. Timing gaps you simply carry forward and expect to clear; genuine shortfalls you escalate to the marketplace and your GSTIN-savvy accountant. Done monthly, it is fifteen minutes; deferred to annual, it is a lost weekend.

Where automation earns its place

The judgement in TCS reconciliation — deciding whether a gap is timing or a real problem, and how to handle it — belongs to you and your CA. But the gathering and matching is pure mechanical toil: pulling TCS figures out of every settlement across every marketplace and lining them up against the portal. That is the part software should carry, and it is the part Robnu’s reconciliation handles so the comparison is ready when you sit down to file.

What a clean reconciliation actually buys you

It is worth being concrete about the payoff, because “reconcile your TCS” can sound like compliance busywork rather than something that protects money. A clean TCS reconciliation gives you three things. First, confidence to claim: when you know the collected figure and the credited figure agree, you can use the credit against your GST liability without the nagging worry that you are claiming a number that will not hold up. Second, early warning: a genuine shortfall — a marketplace that deducted TCS but never deposited it correctly against your GSTIN — is only recoverable while it is fresh, and only visible if you are checking monthly. Third, a defensible record: if a query ever arises on your returns, a period-by-period match between marketplace statements and your portal data is exactly the evidence that resolves it quickly.

The sellers who struggle with TCS are almost never the ones who reconcile badly — they are the ones who never reconcile at all, and then face a year of accumulated, tangled differences when their accountant asks for the numbers at filing time. By then the timing gaps have compounded, the return adjustments have layered on top of each other, and a task that was fifteen minutes a month has become a weekend of forensic work. The discipline is not hard; it is just easy to defer. Building it into the same monthly rhythm as your payment reconciliation is what keeps it from ever becoming that weekend — the TCS check rides along with the deduction check on the same pass over your settlements.

One more reason the monthly habit pays: it keeps you honest about which platform is doing what. When you sell across AJIO, Meesho and Amazon, each files its TCS on its own timeline and in its own format, and a gap on one is easy to lose in the noise of the others. Reconciling every marketplace every month, side by side, is what makes a single platform’s shortfall visible instead of being averaged away across the total. The discipline is not just “does my TCS add up” — it is “does each marketplace’s TCS add up,” which is a stricter and far more useful question.

Sources & further reading

Forms, rates and portal steps evolve, and your treatment depends on your registration and supplies. Treat this as general information and confirm the current process on the official portals and with your chartered accountant:

• GST Portal — GSTR-2A, GSTR-8 and electronic cash ledger
• CBIC-GST — TCS provisions and e-commerce operator filings