Why was Lazy Software Solutions created?

In August 2022 when I started my job as an Inter-CA at a manufacturing and an exporting firm, it was first time I got an exposure to the Exports procedures and how many compliances there are in Exports procedure.

It was then that I got to know what a shipping bill is and how important it is to fill accurate data while filing GSTR – 1.

All the export details are to be filled in Table 6A of GSTR – 1 which welcomes you with these rules and warnings :

CA Sagar Makhijani

How clearly it mentions that any mismatch in Shipping Bills and the data filled for invoice in GSTR 1 may lead to invoices getting rejected by ICEGATE which may cause issues in processing of IGST refund in case of export of goods with payment of tax.

Any mismatch in fields like Invoice number, Invoice Date, Shipping Bill number, Shipping Bill Date, Port code, Taxable Value, IGST Amount may results in lengthy procedures to get your IGST refunds processed.

So in my first month of filing GSTR – 1, I was given the task of getting all the important data from the shipping bill into an excel sheet with fields like :

· Shipping Bill number
· Shipping Bill date
· Port Code
· LUT (Y/N?)
· Invoice number
· Invoice Date & so on.

That is around 15-18 fields of data in each invoice. It takes around 4-5 minutes per Shipping bill to jot all these details down in an excel sheet manually. In the first few months of my job I was happy to do this task mainly because you’re always enthusiastic to work in a new job and secondly there would be around 30-40 invoices in a month.

However, as few months passed the number of invoices sometimes increased to more than 100. This caused a lot of mental fatigue to do the entire task of manually fetching all the data from the shipping bills one by one and then adding them to an excel sheet which would become the base for all the further entries and data checks. All the duty drawback and Rodtep entries in Books of Accounts can be done using this excel sheet. Any errors in the data like entering a wrong shipping bill number or wrong Invoice number or date is usually too tough to catch unless it gets rejected by ICEGATE.

In all this I just had one question in mind:

“Do I trust my eyes enough that I would not be entering any wrong data in the excel sheet?”
And the answer to that question would practically and obviously be a ‘No’.

And me being a very very lazy person it was getting increasingly tough to convince myself to do this manual task every single month which would sometimes take 3-4 days along with some other tasks in the job which means ‘No leave for me in 1-10th of any month until GSTR – 1 is filed’.
So I thought let’s look online for a solution, let’s look for a software that maybe does this task automatically. And to my surprise I couldn’t find a single software online that would help me automate this task.
Now what do I Do?

On one hand there is this important task of getting absolutely accurate data from hundreds of shipping bills in a single month, and on the other hand there is this human risk of messing it up unintentionally; maybe because of some typing error or fat finger error which could lead to IGST Refund getting stuck for months.

Having known some possibilities of Python programming earlier from my previous personal projects I thought maybe let’s give it a shot using python. And few weeks of googling and watching 100s of videos on YouTube later I had a functioning prototype of a software which could do all the manual tedious task of getting the data from multiple shipping bills in a single excel file withing minutes. Although because of my non coding background solving each and every issue in the codes and setting up a proper software with a decent user interface took me months and months. But I am happy to announce that now the software is finally ready.

Now all you have to do in my software is select the folder in which all the Shipping Bills (digital copies sent by ICEGATE) are kept, give an output file name and click ‘Process’ and Done. That’s it. The software will process all the Shipping bills for you in seconds (around 1.2-1.5 seconds per Shipping Bill).

Not only that you can also paste your Invoice data from your books in the template file and compare the data between books and shipping bills within few seconds before filing GSTR – 1. No need to put those lengthy Vlookup formulaes anymore. All that is done for you by the software.

This software is born out of my laziness and this is how Lazy Software Solutions was born.

"Be Lazy. Be Efficient."

- CA Sagar Makhijani