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Every founder starts the financial year meaning to stay on top of compliance, and most lose the thread by the second quarter — not from carelessness, but because the deadlines live in five different places: GST here, TDS there, ROC on its own calendar entirely. This is the single checklist that pulls them into one place.
GST: the monthly cadence
If you're GST-registered, two filings repeat every month without exception: GSTR-1 (outward supplies) and GSTR-3B (summary return with tax payment). Both carry late fees and interest if missed, and a late GSTR-3B also delays your buyers' ability to claim input credit on your invoices — which has a way of becoming a customer relationship problem, not just a compliance one.
The step most founders skip is 2B reconciliation — matching your purchase register against your GSTR-2B before you file, so you're not silently leaving eligible input credit unclaimed. We cover this in more depth in our GST returns & reconciliation guide.
TDS: quarterly returns, monthly deposits
TDS deducted on salaries, professional fees, rent or contractor payments needs to be deposited monthly and returned quarterly — Form 24Q for salaries, Form 26Q for everything else. The most common error we see is the wrong section applied at the point of deduction (194C vs 194J vs 194H), which surfaces months later as a mismatch notice. Getting classification right at the point of payment avoids the correction cycle entirely.
ROC: annual, but non-negotiable
Regardless of turnover or whether you traded at all this year, your company or LLP owes the Registrar of Companies a fixed set of annual filings:
- AOC-4 — financial statements, filed within 30 days of your AGM.
- MGT-7 / MGT-7A — annual return, filed within 60 days of your AGM.
- DIR-3 KYC — annual KYC for every director, or their DIN gets deactivated.
- LLP Form 11 & Form 8 — the LLP equivalents, on their own annual cycle.
Miss any of these and the penalty is a flat ₹100 per day, per form, with no upper cap — a filing a year late costs meaningfully more than the base fee alone. Our ROC & annual filings service tracks all of this against your actual entity type.
Payroll: PF, ESI and the Labour Codes
If you've crossed 20 employees, PF registration is mandatory; ESI kicks in based on employee wage levels and headcount thresholds. On top of the usual monthly cycle, the Labour Codes' phased rollout is changing how "wages" are defined for PF and gratuity purposes in some states — worth a proactive review rather than discovering the change during an audit.
Most missed deadlines aren't about carelessness — they're about not having one place that shows every obligation your specific entity actually owes.
Put it on one calendar
The single highest-leverage fix here isn't remembering more — it's mapping every due date your specific registrations create, once, and reviewing it monthly. That's exactly what our compliance calendar service does: a live view of what's filed, what's due, and what's coming, built from your actual GST, TDS, ROC and payroll registrations rather than a generic template.
If you're not sure what your company currently owes, that's the right place to start — we'll map it for you on a call.
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