The complete guide
GST on course fees is not hard arithmetic — it is hard discipline. The split depends on each student's state, the numbers must run sequentially per financial year, and the invoice has to exist for every rupee that arrives, including the cash. This guide explains how Tensionmukti does that automatically, with your own Zoho Books as the ledger of record.
The decision
The GST split on a service follows the place of supply. A student in your own state is billed CGST plus SGST — two halves of the rate, one to the centre and one to the state. A student from a different state is billed IGST, the full rate in one line. Get it backwards and the return is wrong in both directions.
The failure mode in real institutes is never the arithmetic — it is that the decision is left to whoever is at the desk, per invoice, forever. Tensionmukti removes the decision: your organisation's home state is set once in Settings → GST, every student's state is captured at intake (the field is mandatory, and the intake form makes it fast — pick the state, get the district's cities and PIN prefix), and the split is computed per student, per instalment, automatically. You can watch the decision flip live in the plan splitter on the homepage — toggle the student's state and the rows re-split between CGST+SGST and IGST.
Per instalment
Tensionmukti raises a tax invoice per instalment, at the moment it is paid — not one document for the whole course on day one. This is the shape that survives reality: a registration that was already billed in your Zoho Books before the student existed in any system is mapped by its invoice number instead of billed twice; a rescheduled instalment simply carries its breakdown to the new date; a dropout stops generating documents the moment the remaining rows are cancelled.
Each schedule row stores its own breakdown — base amount, GST amount, and the CGST/SGST or IGST components — written once at enrolment beside the instalment amount itself. The student sees the same numbers on their schedule and on the invoice; the owner sees them roll up in the finance view; nobody recomputes anything in a spreadsheet at filing time.
The ledger
Tensionmukti does not try to replace your accountant's tools. With Zoho Books connected — your own organisation, your own credentials, encrypted at rest — every paid instalment raises the tax invoice in Zoho, applies the payment against it, and stores Zoho's own invoice number and shareable link back on the instalment. The receipt email the student gets carries the real document. Your CA works in the ledger they already trust; the software merely makes sure everything arrives there, correctly split, without anyone typing invoices by hand.
The mapping respects your Zoho configuration rather than hardcoding it: intra-state supplies use your 18% tax group (which Zoho expands to CGST + SGST), inter-state supplies use your IGST tax, and the right one is resolved at runtime per organisation. If you ever leave, the invoices are simply… in your Zoho Books, where they always were.
The desk records a payment once; the invoice, the application and the receipt email all follow from that single act.
Razorpay's cut is booked as an expense with claimable input credit — never silently netted off revenue, which understates both.
Every invoice number, every mapped registration, every payment — with who recorded it and when. Filing season stops being archaeology.
Honesty about scope
One boundary, stated plainly: Tensionmukti is engineering, not tax advice. Whether your institute must register, which exemption applies to which programme, how to treat a composite offering — those are questions for your CA, and the software takes their answers as configuration. What the software owns is the discipline underneath: once the rules are set, every invoice follows them, every time, with no per-invoice human decision — which in practice is where institutes actually get burned.
GST is one part of the collection machine. The schedule the invoices attach to is built at enrolment (instalment fee collection), the payments that trigger them are chased automatically (WhatsApp fee reminders), and the whole system is surveyed in the buyer's guide.
Questions
Commercial coaching and training is generally a taxable service in India, commonly at 18% — unlike formal schooling, which is exempt. Registration thresholds and specific exemptions are questions for your CA, and this page is engineering, not tax advice. What software owes you is different: once your CA says you are registered, every invoice must come out right, automatically, without a per-invoice decision by whoever is at the desk.
It follows the place of supply. A student in your own state is billed CGST plus SGST (each half the rate); a student in a different state is billed IGST (the full rate). Tensionmukti stores your organisation's state once and requires each student's state at intake, then decides the split per student, per instalment, automatically — the desk never chooses.
Because it is the place of supply, and it decides the tax split on every invoice that student will ever receive. Software that lets the field stay empty bills IGST by default — correct for an unknown buyer, silently wrong for the local student sitting in front of you, and nothing downstream ever flags it. Asking once at the desk is cheaper than chasing two hundred people later.
Indian academies overwhelmingly quote inclusive sticker prices — ₹45,000 means ₹45,000 out of the parent's pocket. Tensionmukti supports both readings, set per organisation and adjustable per student: inclusive fees have the tax carved out of each instalment, exclusive fees have it added on top. Either way each row carries its own breakdown.
Sequentially, per financial year, resetting each April — the pattern GST record-keeping expects. The number is assigned the moment a payment is recorded; a numbering hiccup can never block a payment that physically happened (the row is written and the number backfilled). With Zoho Books connected, Zoho's own invoice number and shareable document become the customer-facing truth.
Because tax invoices should match money that actually moved. A single upfront invoice for the whole fee misstates the period, cannot absorb a registration already billed elsewhere, and collapses the moment a student reschedules or drops out. Tensionmukti raises the invoice when an instalment is paid — and if the registration was already invoiced in your Zoho Books before the student ever reached the system, you map that number instead of double-billing.
Keep reading
What it should actually do for an Indian education business, and how to judge one.
Read the guideTurning an agreed fee into a schedule that collects itself, without a lender in the middle.
Read the guideAutomated, polite, and from your own number — with a pay link inside every nudge.
Read the guideYour state, your rate, your Zoho Books — configured in an afternoon, correct on every invoice after that. Tell us your setup and we'll walk you through it.