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Home › Services › Document Guides › TAN Registration

This number is not for your money.

You have been told to get a TAN and you already have a PAN, so the first question is why there are two. Here is the answer, and the whole subject sits inside it. A PAN is who you are as a taxpayer. A TAN is who you are as somebody who holds back tax out of other people’s money. One person, two capacities, and the second has nothing to do with your own income. When you hold tax back from a payment, you are keeping part of what you owed somebody else, to hand to the government on their behalf — so in this capacity you are not a taxpayer at all. You are an unpaid collector. Then a consequence that hardly anyone spells out, and the one part of this page we would keep above all the rest. A shortfall here is not a debt of yours. It is somebody else’s credit that has disappeared. The person you deducted from gets the benefit only if you paid it in and reported it. If you did not, your lapse lands on them before it lands on you — and they cannot see it, because nothing tells them. They find out when their own filing will not reconcile, months later, and they cannot fix it from their side. And that person is not a stranger: your landlord, your contractor, a professional you use, your own employee. Next, the sequence that causes most of the damage. The obligation attaches to the payment, not to the registration, so “we did not have the number yet” is not a defence — the order is simply back to front, and that inversion is what makes this expensive. And the payments concerned mostly do not feel like tax at all: rent above a level, a contractor’s bill, fees to a professional, commission to somebody who brought you business. Which is why somebody with no business, no staff and no office can walk into this through one ordinary payment and never be warned. What we will not do: we print no rate, no limit, no due date and no penalty figure, we do not say whether a payment of yours carries a step, and we compute nothing.

From ₹499 1 – 3 days Collector, not taxpayer Their credit, not your debt
We started a small design studio about fourteen months ago. We pay office rent, we pay two freelance people every month, and we paid a consultant a fairly large amount last year. Our accountant has just asked whether we have a TAN and seemed unhappy when we said no. We have a PAN for the firm. I do not understand what a second number is for, and I would like to know how worried to be, because he did not really explain it and I did not want to look stupid asking.It is a fair question and the explanation you did not get is short, so let me give it properly, because once you see it the rest of this follows on its own. Your PAN identifies you as a taxpayer. It is the number attached to your own income, your own return, your own liability. A TAN is not a second version of that. It identifies you in a completely different capacity, and the capacity is this: somebody who holds back tax out of money belonging to other people. Sit with that phrase for a second, because it is the part that was missing from the conversation with your accountant. When you hold tax back from a payment, the money you are holding is not yours. It was owed to the person you were paying. You kept part of it, and you are supposed to hand that part to the government on their behalf, and tell the system that you did it and whose it was. So in this capacity you are not paying tax. You are collecting it, for somebody else, at your own cost, with your own time, and nobody pays you to do it. That is what the registration marks. Not a liability of yours. A responsibility for a liability of theirs. Now the consequence, which almost nobody explains and which I think will change how you feel about the fourteen months. If you got this wrong, what you have is not a debt. A debt would be simple and it would be yours. What you actually have is somebody else’s credit that has gone missing. Think about your consultant. If you had held tax back from that large payment and paid it in and reported it, then in the consultant’s own return there would be an amount sitting to their credit, which they get the benefit of. If none of that happened, then from their side the money simply is not there. They are not at fault in any way. They did the work, they were paid, and a piece of their tax position has quietly failed to exist because of something that happened in your office. Which gives this subject a shape I see nowhere else. In nearly every compliance failure I deal with, the person who made the mistake is the first person to feel it. Here the first person to feel it is the one you deducted from. And they cannot see it coming, because there is no mechanism anywhere that tells somebody their deduction was not reported. They find out when their own filing will not reconcile, usually many months later, at the point in their year when they least want a problem, and they cannot repair it from their end because the information has to come from yours. So the failure does not arrive as a letter from an office. It arrives as a phone call from your landlord or your freelancer or your consultant, who is upset, who is entirely right to be upset, and whose money it was. That is worth knowing before it happens rather than after, particularly with freelancers you want to keep. Now the thing that I suspect is actually behind your accountant’s reaction, and it is about sequence. People assume the order is: get the number, then start deducting. It is the other way round. The obligation attaches to the payment. It begins the first time you make a payment of the kind that carries it, whether or not you have arranged any means of reporting it. The registration is machinery for an obligation that already exists. And I want to put this bluntly rather than kindly, because it is said to me on most files of this kind and almost always in complete good faith: we did not have the number yet is not a defence. It is the inverted order, and believing it is what turns a fortnight of tidying into a year of unwinding. Which brings me to what you listed, and let me be careful here. I am not going to tell you whether your rent, your freelancers or your consultant carried a step, at what rate, above what figure, or what the position now is. Those are determinations and computations, they run on current rates and real numbers, and they belong to your accountant, who can do all of them in an afternoon once he has the right list in front of him. What I can tell you is the pattern, because the pattern is why this catches so many people. The payments concerned mostly do not feel like tax situations. Rent above a certain level. A contractor’s bill. Fees to a professional. Commission to somebody who introduced business. Look at that list next to yours. Four ordinary payments, none of which announces itself as having a tax step attached, and three of the four are things you do every month without thinking. What they have in common, roughly, is that they are payments to somebody outside your organisation for something they did, rather than purchases of goods off a shelf. That is not a rule and I am not offering it as one. It is where to look. And now the version of this that people find hardest to believe. This can reach somebody who is not running a business at all. An individual, no staff, no office, no accounts, who pays rent above a level or makes one large payment to a professional. No part of their life looks like compliance, and nobody tells them. Word reaches them from the far end instead — by exactly the route I set out a moment ago. Let me also move you away from the registration itself, because it is the smallest part of this and I would rather you spent your worry correctly. Getting the number takes days and is almost entirely paperwork. The obligation is monthly and it does not stop. What you held back, from whom, when it went in, what you reported, and the statement you owe the other person so that they can prove their side. Four things, kept as you go. Businesses that have trouble here nearly always have the number and not the record, and reconstructing a year of that from bank statements in the week somebody asks for it is a genuinely miserable exercise that costs more than the whole of the compliance would have. One practical point on that, and it is the only instruction I would insist on. Give this to whoever actually releases payments, not to your accountant. The deduction has to happen at the moment the payment goes out, and only the person making the payment is in a position to make it happen. If it sits with the accountant, it gets discovered a month later, after the money has already left in full. There is also one small piece of paper worth caring about even though it does nothing for you. You owe the other person a statement showing what you held back on their account. It is the only evidence they have for their own filing and they cannot produce it themselves. Businesses treat it as an afterthought precisely because it has no value to them, and it is the one document in this arrangement that exists entirely for somebody else. On how worried to be, since you asked directly: stop the pattern this month, and take your actual payment list to your accountant rather than a description of it. This is one of the few things I deal with where the position genuinely deteriorates on its own, month by month, because every payment adds another item to be unwound. That is a reason to move this week, not a reason to panic. What we do is the part before the arithmetic. We go through your real payment list and mark every recurring payment that may carry a step, so your accountant reads a marked list instead of a bank statement. We put the date each arrangement started against each line, because the sequence decides everything. We set up the four-item monthly record with a named owner who is the person releasing money. We list plainly anything that has already gone out gross, with dates. And we handle the registration. We do not decide whether a payment carries a step, and we do not compute a single rupee of what is owed. Both of those are your accountant’s, and after an hour with us his afternoon is enough.

What this guide covers

  1. The number is not for your money
  2. It is for somebody else’s
  3. You are not the taxpayer here
  4. You are the collector
  5. The question for every payment
  6. Whose money is this?
  7. Two identities, one person
  8. What a PAN says about you
  9. And what a TAN says
  10. So a shortfall is not a debt
  11. It is somebody else’s credit
  12. The credit that vanishes
  13. Their return, not yours
  14. Your lapse lands on them
  15. And they cannot see it
  16. Until their own filing breaks
  17. Which is usually months later
  18. And they are your landlord or your staff
  19. It begins with the payment
  20. Not with the registration
  21. “We have not got the number yet”
  22. Why that is not a defence
  23. The order people assume
  24. And the order it actually is
  25. The first payment is the trigger
  26. What that means for a new business
  27. And for somebody not in business
  28. The sequence is the whole problem
  29. The payments that do not feel like this
  30. Rent above a line
  31. A contractor’s bill
  32. Professional fees
  33. Commission to somebody helpful
  34. The pattern across all four
  35. What they have in common
  36. One person who is not in business
  37. What we will not calculate
  38. The number is the easy part
  39. The file is not
  40. What has to exist month by month
  41. The certificate you owe them
  42. The paper that does nothing for you
  43. What happens when something changes
  44. Who in your office owns it
  45. And what breaks if nobody does
  46. How to set this up properly
  47. What to do before the first payment
  48. If the money has already gone out
  49. What not to do with the deduction
  50. What this page does not decide
  51. Six ways this goes wrong
  52. The hour that prevents a year
  53. Who brings us this one
  54. What we settle first
  55. The date stays the date
  56. Whose desk this goes to
  57. What we do not compute
  58. Our fee on this setup
  59. And what starts after it

The number is not for your money

Start with the sentence that was missing from the conversation in which somebody told you to get one of these, because everything on this page unfolds from it.

You already have a number for your own tax. This is not a second version of that, an upgrade to it, or a business variant of it.

This registration has nothing to do with your income at all.

It is for somebody else’s

It exists for a different kind of money passing through your hands, and the difference is one of ownership rather than of amount.

When you hold tax back from a payment, the part you keep was owed to the person you were paying. It was theirs. You retained it in order to hand it to the government on their account, and to say whose it was.

So the money never belonged to you, not for a moment. It arrived as theirs, it sat with you as theirs, and it leaves as theirs.

You are not the taxpayer here

Which means the role you occupy is not the one the word “tax” suggests, and misreading the role is where most of the confusion begins.

In your own return you are a taxpayer: you earned, you owe, you pay. Here you have earned nothing, you owe nothing of your own, and the amount is not calculated against anything you did.

You are not a party to this tax. You are a point it passes through.

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You are the collector

And the honest description of what has been arranged is worth putting plainly, because it is rarely said out loud.

The system has handed a piece of its collection work to ordinary businesses and ordinary individuals. You do it at your own cost, with your own staff, in your own time, and nothing is paid for doing it.

That is what the registration marks: not a liability of yours, but a responsibility for somebody else’s. Seeing it that way makes the rest of this subject behave sensibly instead of feeling arbitrary.

The question for every payment

From which the single question worth carrying out of this guide follows, and it can be asked in four words.

Whose money is this?

Put it against any amount leaving your account. Most of the time the answer is “mine, and now theirs” and there is nothing here to think about. Occasionally the answer is “theirs, and part of it is staying with me for a while” — and that answer changes what you have to do.

Whose money is this?

Because the two kinds of money behave completely differently once they are in your account, and businesses treat them identically.

 Your own taxTax you hold back
Whose moneyYoursTheirs
Calculated onWhat you earnedWhat you paid them
Who benefits from itYouThem
Who is hurt if it failsYouThem, first
Identified byYour PANA separate number

Read the fourth row twice. It is the row that makes this subject unlike any other kind of compliance, and the second half of this page is about it.

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Two identities, one person

And once the two kinds of money are separated, the two numbers stop looking like duplication.

They are not two names for one thing. They are two capacities of the same person, each with its own registration, because the system needs to know which hat you are wearing when something arrives from you.

The same firm, the same proprietor, the same office — identified twice, because it does two unrelated jobs.

What a PAN says about you

Take the familiar one first, since almost everybody holds it and almost nobody has articulated what it asserts.

It says: this is me, as somebody who earns and therefore owes. Everything attached to it is about your own position — your income, your deductions, your liability, your refund. It is the number under which you answer for yourself.

And what a TAN says

The other one makes a completely different statement, and it is worth phrasing it as the system would.

This is me, as somebody who holds money belonging to other people and accounts for it on their behalf.

Nothing in that sentence is about you. Which is why a business can need one without owing a rupee of its own tax, and why having the first number tells you nothing at all about whether you need the second.

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So a shortfall is not a debt

Now to the consequence that makes this subject genuinely unusual, and that almost nobody has it explained to them.

Suppose it went wrong. You paid somebody in full when part should have been held back, or you held it back and nothing further happened. People picture the result as a debt: an amount, owed by them, sitting somewhere.

It is not that, because a debt is money of yours that has to go out. This money was never yours to owe.

It is somebody else’s credit

What you actually have is the opposite kind of object, and it belongs to a different person.

Had everything happened properly, an amount would now be sitting to the credit of the person you paid, in their own tax position, available to them. That is what the exercise produces when it works: not a receipt for you, a credit for them.

So when it fails, nothing of yours is missing. Something of theirs is.

The credit that vanishes

And it vanishes in a particular way that is worth describing, because it explains why the repair is so awkward.

It does not go somewhere else. It is not sitting in a wrong account waiting to be moved. It simply never came into existence, because the thing that would have created it — your payment in and your report of whose it was — did not happen.

There is nothing to retrieve, only something to create late, which is a different and more expensive exercise.

Their return, not yours

Where this shows up is also not where you would look for it.

It does not show up in your filing as an unexplained figure. It shows up in theirs, as a credit they expected and cannot find, on a document they are responsible for, prepared by somebody they pay.

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Your lapse lands on them

Which is the structural oddity of this entire area, and the reason we think it deserves a page rather than a paragraph in somebody’s compliance calendar.

In almost everything else we deal with, the person who made the mistake is the first person to feel it. A late filing, a missing registration, an unpapered agreement — the pain arrives at the door it came from.

Here the first person to feel it is the one you deducted from. They did nothing wrong, and they did not even know there was something to get wrong.

And they cannot see it

With no mechanism anywhere that would let them check, which is the part that turns a small failure into a long one.

Nobody writes to a person to say that a deduction taken from them was not reported. No message arrives. No alert fires. They have no access to your records and no standing to ask your accountant anything.

So from their side the position looks completely normal for as long as nothing forces them to reconcile it — and nothing does, until their own year closes.

Until their own filing breaks

At which point it surfaces, and it surfaces as arithmetic that will not agree.

They sit down to file. Their figure for what was held back from them does not match what the system shows. The gap is unexplained, it is not theirs to explain, and the only person who can resolve it is somebody they are not in a position to compel.

Which is usually months later

And the delay is not incidental. It is what makes the whole thing hard to fix.

By the time anybody notices, several things have changed. The money has long been received in full and spent. The year has closed. The person who made the payments may have left. And the window in which a correction was cheap and quiet has gone.

We would put it this way: the problem is created in a minute, discovered in a year, and repaired over a quarter. That ratio is the reason the only sensible place to deal with it is the beginning.

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And they are your landlord or your staff

Which brings us to the thing that makes this more than a compliance matter, and the reason businesses that have been through it are unusually careful afterwards.

The person on the other side of this is not a stranger and not a government office. Look at who it typically is:

So the failure does not arrive as a letter. It arrives as a phone call from somebody who is upset and is right to be, about money that was theirs. That is a different kind of cost from a penalty, and it is not insurable.

It begins with the payment

Now the sequence, which is responsible for more damage in this area than anything else and is corrected in one sentence.

The obligation does not wait for you to be ready for it. It attaches to the act of paying somebody, the first time you make a payment of the kind that carries it.

The payment creates the duty. The registration is only how you discharge it.

Not with the registration

Which is the reverse of how everybody assumes it works, and the assumption is entirely reasonable.

Most obligations in business do begin with a registration. You register for something, and from that point a set of duties starts. The registration is the switch. People carry that model across and it does not apply here.

Here the registration is machinery for a duty that already exists, in the same way that a cheque book is machinery for an account rather than the thing that creates one.

“We have not got the number yet”

So here is the sentence we hear on most files of this kind, and it is almost always said in complete good faith.

It is said by people who intend to comply, who have asked somebody, who are waiting for a form to come back, and who have in the meantime kept paying their landlord and their contractor in full because what else were they supposed to do.

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Why that is not a defence

And we would rather say this bluntly than kindly, because the kind version of it has cost people a year.

Not having arranged the means of reporting something does not excuse not doing it. The duty was not conditional on your administration being in place. Nobody is relieved of holding money back because they had not yet obtained the facility for accounting for it.

Believing otherwise is the single commonest route from a fortnight of tidying to a year of unwinding, and the belief is held sincerely by almost everybody who holds it.

The order people assume

Set the two sequences side by side, because seeing them together is what actually fixes the instinct.

The assumed order, which is how everything else in business works: decide you need it, apply, receive the number, start complying, and anything before that is outside the system.

And the order it actually is

The real order, which has one fewer step and no comfortable period at the front.

  1. You make a payment of the relevant kind.
  2. The duty exists from that moment.
  3. You need the number in order to account for it.
  4. Everything you did before getting the number still counts.

There is no grace period built into the structure, which is why the sensible move is to settle this before the first payment rather than after the first year.

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The first payment is the trigger

Which makes one specific date more important than any other date in this subject, and it is a date nobody records.

Not the date you registered. Not the date your accountant mentioned it. The date you first made the payment — signed the rent arrangement and paid the first month, engaged the contractor and settled the first bill, agreed the fee and transferred it.

We ask for that date on every line of a payment list, and in most cases nobody in the business can produce it without going back to an email. It is in the agreement, or in the bank statement, and it takes ten minutes to find on the day and three weeks to find two years later.

What that means for a new business

And for a business that has just started, the practical reading is simple and slightly inconvenient.

The month you take an office and start paying people is the month this becomes live — not the month somebody gets round to the compliance list. Which is unfortunate timing, because that is also the busiest and least organised month a business ever has.

A establishment registration, a tax registration and this all tend to land in the same fortnight, and this is the one of the three with no visible deadline attached, so it is the one that waits.

And for somebody not in business

With a harder version of the same point, for people who have no compliance list at all.

An individual who has never registered for anything, has no accountant, keeps no books, and simply pays rent or makes one substantial payment to a professional. There is no month in which they sit down with a list, because there is no list.

For them the trigger passes completely unobserved, and the first information they get about it is frequently the mechanism described earlier — somebody else’s filing not reconciling.

The sequence is the whole problem

To close this section with the thing worth remembering if nothing else from it survives.

Almost nobody in this area fails because they refused. They fail because they did it in the wrong order.

Which is encouraging, in a way. An obligation people are unwilling to meet is a hard problem. An obligation people are willing to meet and have sequenced wrongly is fixed by one conversation held early enough.

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The payments that do not feel like this

Now the part that explains why this reaches so many people who were never warned, and it is not about the law being obscure.

The payments concerned do not present themselves as tax situations. They present themselves as ordinary monthly outgoings, of the sort a business makes without convening anybody.

Rent above a line

The first and the most common, and the one that catches people who are otherwise entirely compliant.

You take premises, you sign a rent arrangement, you pay monthly by transfer. There is nothing in that transaction that feels like anything other than paying for a place to sit. Above a certain level it carries a step, and the level is a figure we are not going to print.

It catches individuals as readily as businesses, which is why it is the single most frequent route by which somebody with no compliance life at all ends up in this subject.

A contractor’s bill

The second, and the one where the amounts are usually largest and the relationship most ongoing.

Somebody does work for you under a contract arrangement or a vendor arrangement and raises a bill. You settle it the way you settle any bill. Nothing in the process routes it past anybody who would notice a tax step, because bills do not go to the accountant before they are paid — they go to the accountant afterwards.

Professional fees

The third, and the one with a particular irony attached to it.

You pay a professional for advice or a service under a consultancy arrangement or a service arrangement. These are often one-off, often substantial, and often the largest single payments a small business makes in a year.

And occasionally the professional on the other side of the payment is the very person who would have told you about it, which is a sequence problem of a different and slightly comic kind.

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Commission to somebody helpful

The fourth, and the one most often handled entirely informally, which is where the difficulty lies.

Somebody introduced a customer. You agreed to look after them. The amount is settled by transfer, or sometimes by adjustment against something else, under a commission arrangement or an agency arrangement that may exist only as a conversation.

Payments arranged by goodwill tend not to be documented, and payments that are not documented tend not to be reviewed by anybody who would spot a step in them.

The pattern across all four

Put the four together and a shape appears, which is more useful than a list to memorise.

PaymentWhy it goes unnoticed
RentFeels like occupancy, not a transaction
Contractor’s billPaid before anybody in accounts sees it
Professional feesOccasional, so no routine catches it
CommissionOften undocumented and informally agreed

None of the four fails for a legal reason. All four fail because of where they sit in the day.

What they have in common

And the common thread, offered as a place to look rather than as a rule.

All four are payments to somebody outside your organisation for something they did, rather than purchases of goods off a shelf. Services rather than stock. A person rather than a product.

That is a rough heuristic and nothing more. Whether a particular payment of yours actually carries a step depends on its nature, its size, who is receiving it and what else you have paid them, and it is a determination for a chartered accountant on your real figures. We do not make it and nobody should make it from a page.

One person who is not in business

With one case worth stating separately, because the general framing of this subject assumes a business and the assumption excludes the people most exposed.

No firm, no staff, no office, no accountant, no books. One individual, paying rent above a level on a flat, or settling one large bill with a professional. Every piece of guidance on this subject is addressed to businesses, so nothing they read is about them.

They have no mechanism by which this could have been noticed, and that is not carelessness on their part. It is a gap in who the information is written for.

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What we will not calculate

And we would rather mark our own limit here, where you will actually read it, than leave it sitting at the bottom.

You will not find on this page a rate, a threshold, a due date, a penalty, an interest figure, a category list, or a statement about whether any payment of yours is caught. Not one number appears anywhere on it except what we charge.

Two reasons, of different weight. The figures are revised, they differ by the kind of payment and by who receives it, and a page stating them confidently is read long after it stopped being true. More seriously, a reader who finds a threshold here will do arithmetic against it and conclude they are outside, without anybody having looked at their payment list. That conclusion, reached on a page, is worse than no information at all, because it will be relied on and never revisited.

The number is the easy part

Now a redirection of where your attention should go, because this page is named after the smallest component of the subject.

Obtaining the registration is paperwork. Days, a few documents, and then it never needs doing again. Nobody has ever had a serious problem because of the registration itself.

The number is a morning. The obligation is every month, indefinitely.

The file is not

And the monthly half is where the whole of the real cost and the whole of the real risk live.

Businesses in trouble on this subject nearly always have the registration. What they do not have is a record. The number was obtained because somebody asked for it; the habit was never started because nobody asked for that.

A registration with no record behind it is worse than useless — it establishes that you understood the obligation and then did not discharge it.

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What has to exist month by month

Four things, and we are deliberately describing a habit rather than a form.

  1. Who you paid — by name, with the arrangement it falls under.
  2. What you held back — the amount, against that payment.
  3. When it went in — the date it actually left for the government, not the date it was due.
  4. What you reported — which filing it was included in, and whose it was recorded as.

Four columns on one sheet, filled in as each payment goes out. Businesses that keep it find this subject trivial. Businesses that do not find themselves reconstructing a year from a bank statement in the week somebody asks, which is where almost all the cost in this area actually goes.

The certificate you owe them

And there is a fifth item, which is not for your file at all.

You owe the person you deducted from a statement of what you held back on their account. It is their evidence, for their own filing, of money that left their hands and did not reach them.

They cannot produce it themselves. Nobody else can produce it. It exists only if you issue it, and until you do, they have nothing to show.

The paper that does nothing for you

Which explains, without excusing, why it is the item most often skipped.

Every other piece of paper a business produces does something for the business. An invoice gets you paid. A receipt proves you paid. A return closes an obligation. This one does nothing for you whatsoever — its entire value accrues to somebody else.

A document whose only beneficiary is the other party gets chased by nobody — so it survives only as an assigned task, never as a good intention.

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What happens when something changes

With a practical note about the events that quietly break an arrangement that was working.

None of those announces itself as a tax event. All of them are tax events in this one narrow respect.

Who in your office owns it

And this is the one instruction on the page we would actually insist on, because it is counter to what everybody does.

Give it to whoever releases payments. Not to the accountant.

The deduction has to happen at the moment the money goes out, so only the person making the payment is in a position to make it happen. An accountant working from last month’s statement can tell you it should have happened. They cannot make it have happened.

And what breaks if nobody does

Because the failure mode when this is unowned is quiet, gradual and completely frictionless.

Payments go out in full, one at a time, month after month. Nothing stops. Nobody queries anything. The people being paid are perfectly happy, because they received more rather than less.

Every one of those payments is a separate small failure, and they accumulate without a single signal. By the time a year is being closed, the money has been received in full by people who may no longer be easy to go back to, and what was a deduction has become a negotiation.

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How to set this up properly

The working half, in an order that does not need revisiting.

  1. List everybody you pay regularly who is not a supplier of goods — rent, contractors, professionals, commission, staff.
  2. Against each, write the month that arrangement started and the date of the first payment under it.
  3. Take that marked list to a chartered accountant, who says which lines carry a step and at what rate.
  4. Obtain the registration, which happens in parallel and is the short part.
  5. Set up the four-column sheet and name its owner — the person who releases payments.
  6. Add the statement you owe each person to that same routine, so it is not a separate thing to remember.
  7. Diarise one review a year, and one whenever a new arrangement of any of those kinds begins.

One, two and five fall to us, and they absorb most of the hours. Step three is short because of steps one and two. Step seven is what stops this coming back.

What to do before the first payment

And for anybody reading this before they have started, which is the cheapest place to be reading it.

Settle the question in the same week you take premises or engage your first contractor, in the same conversation as your other registrations. It is one question to an accountant, and the answer costs nothing when it comes before the payment.

The only genuinely cheap version of this subject is the one dealt with in advance, and in advance means before money moves rather than before anybody complains.

If the money has already gone out

And for the rest, which is most readers.

Stop the pattern this week. Build the payment list with dates. Put it in front of a chartered accountant as a list, not as a description, and ask them specifically about the period that has already run.

Do not estimate it yourself, do not let somebody tell you it will be fine, and do not wait for the other side to raise it. Every further payment adds one more line that has to be unpicked rather than simply fixed, so standing still here is not neutral.

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What not to do with the deduction

Four things we see people do with the best of intentions, each of which makes the position harder.

All four are attempts to be decent about it. The decent route runs through an accountant, not around one.

What this page does not decide

Understanding a structure is not the same as having an answer. Every item below is still unanswered, and together they account for most of the reason you opened this.

Everything we do comes earlier than that list, and stays narrow deliberately: the aim is to hand over facts solid enough for the deciding to happen at one desk in one go.

Six ways this goes wrong

Six patterns from the files that have reached us. Not one of them involved anybody refusing to comply.

The patternHow it read to the people doing it
Paid rent in full for two yearsJust paying for the office
Kept paying while waiting for the numberNothing else we could do
Got the number, never started a recordRegistered, therefore compliant
Held it back and never paid it inSet aside, to be dealt with
Never issued the statements to anybodyNobody asked for one
Person who paid bills left; habit left with themHandover looked complete

Run your eye down the second column. Five of the six were somebody being reasonable with the information they had. The sixth is a handover, which is where obligations with no visible output tend to disappear.

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The hour that prevents a year

Everything above, reduced to two columns of time.

One hour, early: list the people you pay who are not selling you goods, put a start date against each, ask an accountant which lines carry a step, and name the person who will fill in four columns on payment day.

One hour at the start, or one quarter of unwinding later — plus a conversation with somebody whose money it was.

Who brings us this one

Enquiries on this subject arrive in a small number of recognisable forms, and the form usually says how much room is left.

Of those six, the opening one costs least to put right. The second has somebody waiting on an apology before anything else happens.

What we settle first

Our own part begins with a list and ends before any figure is worked out.

  1. Build the real payment list from your bank records and arrangements — every recurring payment that is not a purchase of goods.
  2. Mark each line with the kind of payment it is, so it reaches your accountant classified rather than raw.
  3. Find and record the first-payment date on every line, from the agreement or the statement.
  4. Identify anything that has already gone out in full, with dates and amounts, and set it out plainly rather than softly.
  5. Handle the registration itself.
  6. Build the four-column monthly sheet, and add the statement-to-the-other-person step into the same routine.
  7. Name the owner — the person who releases payments — and leave a one-page note of how it works for whoever inherits it.

None of that is a determination or a calculation. All of it is why the determination and the calculation take an afternoon.

The date stays the date

One thing we will not do, and on this subject it is asked for more often than on most.

Everything we draft bears the day it was actually drafted, and no other. Not a statement to a payee, not a record of when something was held back, not a note of when an arrangement began.

The temptation here is specific: a payee needs a statement, the money went in late, and moving one date would make everything line up for everybody. It would also be a document asserting that money reached the government on a day it did not — relied on by the payee in their own filing. That converts an administrative lapse into something of an entirely different order, and it does it to the person you were trying to help.

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Whose desk this goes to

Not one row here lands on us. That split is precisely why this stays inexpensive.

QuestionWhose
Does this payment carry a step?Chartered accountant
At what rate, above what figure, by when?The same
What has the lapse cost?The same — a computation
The periodic returns and the statementsThe same, every period
A notice has arrivedAn advocate, with the accountant
Staff or contractor?An advocate — it reaches well beyond tax
Making the deduction on payment dayYour own office. Nobody else can.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.

What we do not compute

Said once more at the place where clients most often try again, and the answer does not soften.

No amount, no rate, no interest, no consequence, no exposure, no view on the period already run. Those are arithmetic against current figures carried out by somebody who stands behind the figure, and that is the only reason the figure is worth anything.

We will say whether the list holds together and name the holes in it — which, in practice, is the thing that stalls these files.

Our fee on this setup

For getting this set up and the position straight — building the real payment list from your bank records and your arrangements rather than from memory, marking each line with the kind of payment it is so your accountant receives it classified instead of raw, finding and recording the first-payment date on every single line because the sequence decides everything else, setting out plainly and with dates anything that has already gone out in full, obtaining the registration itself, building the four-column monthly sheet and folding the statement you owe each payee into the same routine so it is not a separate thing to remember, naming the owner as the person who releases payments rather than the person who keeps the books, and leaving a one-page note so that whoever inherits this does not begin from a blank sheet — the fee is ₹499. The 1 – 3 days quoted is the registration; our own reading and listing work runs alongside it.

These sit outside the fee, and here is why each does:

Put plainly: the fee buys a classified payment list and a monthly habit, not a number. Any agent can get you the registration in a morning. What decides whether this ever becomes a problem is whether somebody marked the right lines and whether anybody fills in four columns on the day money leaves.

And what starts after it

And a last word, because this is one of the registrations where getting it is the beginning rather than the end.

From the month it is live, there is a period that recurs forever, a statement owed to every person deducted from, and a question that reopens quietly every time a new arrangement of the relevant kind begins. None of that is difficult. All of it is continuous.

You have not taken on a liability. You have taken on a duty to other people — and that is the part worth telling whoever will actually be doing it.

Get the right payments marked before anybody calculates anything

We build the real payment list from your records, mark each line by the kind of payment it is, find the first-payment date on every line, set out plainly anything that has already gone out in full, obtain the registration, build the four-column monthly sheet with the statement to each payee folded in, and name the person releasing payments as its owner. We do not decide whether a payment carries a step and we compute nothing — no rate, no limit, no date, no consequence.

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Tis Hazari Court Complex, New Delhi, Delhi 110054

Why this page is written the way it is, and what it refuses to contain

Nowhere on this page: every rate, every threshold, every due date, every penalty and interest figure, the categories of payment with their limits, the forms, the portal, the periodic return mechanics, and any statement about whether a payment of yours is caught. A page about a tax registration that carries no figures at all, our own fee excepted. That is close to the whole of what a reader arrives looking for.

Two reasons, and the second is much the stronger. The mechanics and the figures are left out for the familiar reason: rates and limits are revised, they differ by the kind of payment and by who receives it, and a page asserting them confidently will be read for years after it stopped being accurate. The serious reason is about what a number on a page does to a reader. Somebody who finds a threshold here will put their own rent beside it, conclude they are underneath, and stop — without anybody having looked at their payment list, their other payments to the same person, or the kind of payment it actually is. A wrong reassurance is worse than silence, because it gets relied on once and never revisited. On this particular subject the cost of that false comfort falls on a third party who never read the page at all, which is why we would rather send every reader to an accountant than keep a few of them on the site with a figure.

Take the numbers out and what remains is the structure, which no revision touches. That this registration is not about your own tax but about money belonging to other people passing through your hands — so a PAN and this are one person in two capacities, and holding the first tells you nothing about needing the second. That you are not a taxpayer in this capacity but an unpaid collector, carrying a responsibility for somebody else’s liability. That a shortfall is therefore not a debt of yours but another person’s credit that never came into existence, so there is nothing to retrieve and only something to create late. That your lapse lands on them before it lands on you, and that they have no mechanism by which to see it until their own filing will not reconcile months afterwards. That the obligation attaches to the payment and not to the registration, so the order everybody assumes is inverted and “we did not have the number yet” is the commonest route from a fortnight to a year. That the payments concerned are ordinary ones that do not present as tax situations. And that the deduction can only be made by whoever releases the money, which is why the task belongs to them and not to the accountant. Change a rate tomorrow and every sentence in that paragraph still holds.

Why the third-party point is the one we would keep. If a single idea from this page survives, we would want it to be that the person hurt first is not the one who made the mistake. It changes how a business behaves, in a way that a penalty figure does not. A business owner who understands that a missed step removes a credit from their own landlord, contractor or employee — somebody they will see next month, who did nothing wrong and cannot fix it — tends to put a name against this task that same week. We have watched that explanation do more than any warning about consequences, and it has the advantage of being the accurate description rather than the motivating one.

Where to go rather than here. A chartered accountant, with your actual payment list in front of them rather than a description of your business, because this turns on individual payments and not on what kind of firm you are — and ask them about the period already run, specifically, rather than hoping it comes up. An advocate if a notice has arrived, or if the question of whether somebody is staff or a contractor is live. Your own bank statement, which is the only honest source for what you have actually paid and when. Your arrangements and your old emails, which carry the first-payment dates nobody can otherwise reconstruct. And the person in your office who releases money, who is the only one who can make any of this happen on the day.

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Questions people actually ask

Somebody said we need a TAN. We already have a PAN. Why two numbers?
They do two unrelated jobs, and that distinction carries the rest of this page. A PAN says who you are as a taxpayer. A TAN says who you are as somebody who holds back tax out of other people’s money. One person, two capacities. The second one is not about your income at all, which is why having the first does not cover it.
Whose money are we talking about, then?
Not yours, and that sentence is worth repeating until it sticks. When you hold back tax from a payment, you are keeping part of what you owed somebody else, in order to hand it to the government on their behalf. You are not paying your own tax here. You are collecting theirs. The money passes through you and was never, at any point, your money.
So we are acting as a collector for the government?
In substance, yes, and unpaid. It is worth seeing the arrangement plainly rather than as a form-filling chore. The system hands part of its collection work to ordinary businesses and individuals, who do it at their own cost, with their own staff, on their own time. That is what the registration marks: not that you owe something, but that you have been made responsible for somebody else’s.
If the money was never ours, what happens if we get it wrong?
This next part is the one clients almost never have explained to them, and of everything here it matters most. A shortfall is not a debt of yours. It is somebody else’s credit that has disappeared. The person you held it back from gets the benefit of it in their own return only if you paid it in and reported it properly. If you did not, their money is gone from their side of the ledger, and they did nothing wrong.
So our mistake affects them before it affects us?
That is exactly the shape of it, and it is unusual. In most compliance failures you are the first person to feel it. Here the first person to feel it is the one you deducted from, and they feel it in their own filing, where their figure does not match what the system shows. They will not know why, and they will not be able to fix it from their end.
Can they see whether we have done it or not?
Not usefully and not in time, which compounds everything above. There is no moment at which the other person is told that you failed to report their deduction. They find out when their own return does not reconcile, which is usually months later and at the worst possible point in their year — and by then the window in which it was easy to correct has closed.
Who is this other person usually?
Somebody you have an ongoing relationship with, which is what makes it more than a compliance matter. Your landlord. Your contractor. A professional you use. Your own employee. Not a stranger. So the failure does not arrive as a notice from an office — it arrives as a phone call from somebody who is upset, who is right to be, and whose money it was.
When does the obligation actually start? When we get the number?
No, and getting that backwards is the single most expensive error in this area. The obligation attaches to the payment, not to the registration. It begins the first time you make a payment of the kind that calls for it. The registration is how you then account for what you held back. It is machinery for an obligation that already exists.
We made the payment before we had the number. Is that a defence?
It is the commonest thing people say and it is not a defence, because it has the sequence inverted. Nobody is excused a deduction on the ground that they had not yet arranged the means of reporting it. We say this bluntly rather than gently because it is said to us on most files of this kind, nearly always honestly meant, and accepting it is how a fortnight of tidying becomes a year of unwinding.
Which payments are we talking about? We are not a big company.
And this is the part that catches people, because the payments concerned mostly do not feel like tax situations at all. Rent above a certain level. A contractor’s bill. Fees to a professional. Commission to somebody who brought you business. Ordinary payments, made by ordinary businesses, none of which announces itself as something with a tax step attached.
What do those four have in common?
They are all payments to somebody outside your organisation for something they did, rather than purchases of goods off a shelf. That is the rough pattern and it is worth carrying, because it tells you where to look. Whether any particular payment of yours actually falls in is a determination for a chartered accountant, and the answer depends on figures and facts we will not guess at.
Can you tell us the rates and the limits?
No, and we print none of them on this page deliberately. Rates, thresholds and categories are revised, they differ by the kind of payment and by who is receiving it, and a figure read off a page is acted on without anybody checking it. That is your accountant’s territory and it is a short conversation for them. What we give you is the structure underneath, which does not change when a rate does.
Could this apply to somebody who is not running a business at all?
It can, and that is the version of this that most surprises people. An individual with no business, no staff and no office can walk into this through a single ordinary payment — most commonly rent above a level, or a large payment to a professional. Nobody warns them, nothing in their life resembles compliance, so word of it tends to arrive at an angle — by way of whoever they paid.
Is getting the number the hard part?
It is the easy part, and that is why this page spends so little time on it. The number takes days. The file takes forever, because it is monthly and it never stops. What you held back, from whom, when you paid it in, what you reported, and the statement you owe the other person — that is the actual obligation, and it recurs for as long as the payments do.
What has to exist month by month?
A record with four things in it, kept as you go rather than reconstructed later. Who you paid, what you held back, when it went in, and what you told the system. Reconstructing a year of that from a bank statement in the week somebody asks for it is a grim and familiar job, and it accounts for very nearly every rupee this subject ever costs anybody.
There is a statement we are supposed to give the other person?
There is, and it is the one piece of paper in this whole arrangement that exists purely for somebody else’s benefit. It is their evidence that you held money back on their account — which they need for their own filing and cannot produce themselves. To a business it is an afterthought, since it earns them nothing. To whoever receives it, it is the only evidence in existence.
Who in our office should be responsible for all this?
One named person, and it should be whoever actually releases payments rather than whoever keeps the books. The deduction has to happen at the moment of payment, and only the person making the payment is in a position to make it happen. Giving this to the accountant means it is discovered a month later, after the money has already gone out in full.
What breaks if nobody owns it?
Payments go out gross, quietly, one at a time, for months. Nothing stops. Nobody complains. And every one of those payments is a separate small failure that nobody will notice until a year is being closed — at which point the money has been received in full by people who may no longer be easy to go back to, and the arithmetic has to be unwound rather than corrected.
We have already been paying people without deducting. What now?
Stop the pattern this week, and put it in front of a chartered accountant with the actual payment list rather than a description of it. Very little in compliance deteriorates by itself; this does, every single month, because every payment adds another item. We will not tell you what the exposure is — that is a computation and it belongs to somebody qualified to do it.
Will you work out what we owe?
No. We compute nothing on this subject — no amount held back, no interest, no consequence, no exposure. Those are arithmetic done against current rates and dates on your real figures, and a chartered accountant does them properly in an afternoon. What we do is get the facts into a shape where that afternoon is enough.
Realistically, how long does the setup take?
The registration itself is 1 – 3 days, and almost none of that is us. The part that takes real time is deciding which of your payments this touches and getting a monthly habit started, and that is a conversation with an accountant plus somebody in your office agreeing to do something differently on payment day. The number is never what holds anybody up.
So what does your part of this consist of?
Getting the position straight before anybody computes anything. We go through your actual payment list and mark every recurring payment that may carry a step, so your accountant is reading a marked list rather than a bank statement. We put the first-payment dates against each one, because the sequence decides everything. We set up the four-item monthly record with a named owner who is the person releasing payments. We check whether anything already went out gross and list it plainly. And we handle the registration itself. What we do not do is decide or calculate, which the next answer sets out.
Which questions will you simply not touch?
Whether a payment of yours carries a step; at what rate; above what figure; by when; what a lapse costs; and what the position is on what you have already paid out. All six are a chartered accountant’s, and the sixth may be an advocate’s if a notice has arrived. We also print no rate, limit, date or penalty figure on this page at all, and the closing section explains why.
Our accountant says we do not need this. Should we still ask?
If your accountant has looked at your actual payment list and said so, that is an answer from the right person and we would not second-guess it. The question worth asking is whether they looked at the list or at your business in general, because this turns on individual payments rather than on what kind of business you are. A single new arrangement — a new office on rent, a new contractor — can change the answer without anything else changing.
What should we have ready before we talk?
Three things, all of which already exist somewhere. A list of everybody you pay regularly who is not a supplier of goods — rent, contractors, professionals, commission. The month each of those arrangements started, which is usually in an agreement or an email. And the name of the person who actually releases payments. Hand those over and this takes very little time. Turn up without them and two weeks go on chasing people for answers.
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