If you are a Shopify merchant, based out of India in particular, this guide will help you understand the basics of ShipTurtle’s Invoicing feature and its unique options for Invoicing on Shopify in India.
Shopify Taxation and its limitations
Shopify has currently no feature to make an invoice and send it to the customer. While it calculates taxes at checkout, it is upto the merchant to create his invoice using Excel or his accounting software and send it to the customers. This is quite a tedious process since all Product, Order and Customer information needs to be copy-pasted from one portal to another.
What’s more, Shopify being a global company with predominantly American and European presence has features that are suitable for that audience. One such very important feature is its Tax rules. Shopify lets the users define certain Tax rules basis different zones. The same can be overridden for different product categories. It lets the user maintain HSN codes, however, there is no linkage of tax rules to the HSN codes.
However in India, taxation, and accounting is quite different, Shopify’s default functionality is quite unsuitable to calculate the same. There are two basic rules which need to be followed –
- Each product needs to have an HSN code. The tax rate is linked to this HSN code
- The tax is divided into three components – IGST, CGST, and SGST. This division for each order depends on the State/Province of Origin and the State/Province where the order is to be dispatched to.
- At the time of filing of returns, a detailed account needs to be maintained for each order, its products, and relevant taxes. This is needed for calculating input GST credits and output GST to be paid to the government.
ShipTurtle and its features for Invoicing on Shopify (for India, USA, Europe and Rest of World)
ShipTurtle has several features which help in creating an Invoice –
- Easy setup, Auto sync of order and customer details with Shopify
All the information present in a Shopify order is automatically picked up. For India, HSN codes and Tax rates can be maintained in masters at a Product level. The UI has been designed such that any HSN/Tax edits can be done from the order page itself instead of needing to go the settings page each time. (see screenshot below)
- Beautiful Invoicing layouts which can be customized
Simple settings can change the look and feel, set invoice numbering format, add columns for GST invoicing, etc. American and European users can use the standard invoice format with tax rules auto picked up from Shopify.
Indian users can have a GST invoice format and choose to make them with tax included or excluded.
- Convenient order export functions with all details ready to use for Invoicing Softwares (Tally, Quickbooks, etc.)
A single click gives all your invoice details order – wise. Some important information we maintain on cloud is your actual Invoice pdf, order wise tax information, invoice number, shipment status as well as information at a product level.
- Ability to craft Invoices on behalf of vendors
Do you run a drop shipment or marketplace website? ShipTurtle seamlessly integrates with all your vendors so that they can all maintain their individual Invoice details.
In the case of a drop shipment, merchants can create invoices and share them with the vendors. In the case of the marketplace, the vendors can have their own invoice settings.
- Bulk Invoicing
Shipturtle lets you create invoices for 100s of orders with a single click. It has an inbuilt logic for maintaining invoice numbers in sequence.
In summary
Shopify is a great choice for launching an eCommerce website. However, in order to manage your invoices conveniently, you need a plugin like ShipTurtle. While there are other invoicing applications available in the market, what sets ShipTurtle apart is its ability to manage multiple vendors or drop shippers and its provision to create GST enabled invoices.
