Client profile
An auto-components manufacturer in Telangana, approximately ₹180 crore turnover, roughly 400 active vendors, with two plants and a central accounts team of six. Details are anonymised.

The problem

The company carried a growing gap between the credit in its purchase register and the credit appearing in GSTR-2B. Nobody could explain it line by line, so each year the difference was quietly written off to the profit and loss account. By the time we were engaged, the accumulated gap stood at about ₹42 lakh.

What we did

  1. Weeks 1–2 — rebuild the base. Extracted 36 months of purchase data and GSTR-2B, normalised GSTIN and invoice number formats, and matched on a tolerance basis rather than exact strings.

  2. Weeks 3–4 — segment by root cause. Split the residual gap into four queues: supplier never filed, supplier filed under the wrong GSTIN, value or rate mismatch, and our own booking errors.

  3. Weeks 5–9 — vendor remediation. Issued queue-specific communications and, crucially, routed unresolved cases into the fortnightly payment approval run so commercial leverage applied naturally.

  4. Weeks 10–12 — claim, reverse and document. Availed the recoverable credit in the eligible periods, reversed what was genuinely blocked under section 17(5), and documented the basis for each decision.

Root cause

Value (₹ lakh)

Outcome

Supplier had not filed

18.4

16.1 recovered after follow-up

Wrong GSTIN used by supplier

9.7

9.7 recovered via amendment

Value or rate mismatch

7.2

5.9 recovered, balance credit-noted

Blocked under section 17(5)

6.7

Correctly reversed, not recoverable

Where the ₹42 lakh actually sat

The result

₹31.7 lakh of credit was recovered and ₹6.7 lakh was correctly identified as blocked and reversed with a documented rationale — which is itself a win, because it removed an exposure the company did not know it carried. The remaining balance related to vendors who had ceased operations.

What made it stick
We handed over a monthly three-bucket reconciliation with a named owner and put the 180-day payment flag into the creditors ageing report. Eighteen months later the backlog has not rebuilt.

We assumed the difference was the cost of doing business. It was mostly just unfinished follow-up. — Finance Controller, client company

Sitting on unreconciled credit?
We will size the recoverable portion before you commit to anything.
Request an ITC health check