Research: How do CA firms handle GSTR-2B reconciliation & IMS? (Not selling anything)

I do not know if this is an advanced scam, I keep seeing same pattern / questions with newly created accounts. 

Hi Aashok sir, I completely understand the skepticism. I'm Jai Ashish Alla, a 20-year-old B.Tech CSE student from Hyderabad. I'm genuinely trying to understand CA workflows before deciding whether to build a GST tool. My email is jaiashishalla @ gmail.com . Happy to verify I'm a real person. If you have 20 minutes to speak, I would be very grateful.

Happy to share our workflow on this since we run this for multiple clients every month.

GSTR-2B reconciliation process we use:

Step 1 (by 14th): Download client GSTR-2B for the month. Match each line against the purchase register (purchase invoices + debit notes in the books).

Step 2 (by 17th): Flag mismatches into three buckets:
- Timing difference: Supplier filed in the current month but invoice is booked in the next month (or vice versa). Action: Carry forward to next period.
- Genuine mismatch: Invoice in books does not match GSTR-2B data. Action: Contact supplier for correction or amendment in their next GSTR-1.
- Missing: Invoice in books but not in GSTR-2B (supplier has not filed). Action: Follow up with supplier before the 20th or lose the ITC for the month.

Step 3 (IMS actions, by 19th): For invoices in GSTR-2B that match our books, we Accept in IMS. For ones we have a query on, we mark Pending (they carry to next month). We do not Reject unless the invoice is genuinely wrong or fraudulent.

Step 4 (20th): File GSTR-3B with ITC from accepted IMS actions only.

Common pain point: Clients with high supplier counts (50+ vendors) need a reconciliation template or a tool that auto-matches PAN + invoice number + amount. Manual matching takes 3-5 hours for a medium business.

For help with monthly GSTR-2B reconciliation, [Tax Garden GST services](https://taxgarden.in/services) run this as a fully managed monthly process.

Thank you so much for sharing this detailed workflow — this is exactly what I was trying to understand.

A few follow-up questions if you don't mind:

1. When you say manual matching takes 3-5 hours — is that per client or total across all your clients for the month?
2. What tool or template do you currently use for reconciliation — Excel, Tally, or something else?
3. For the IMS step — how do you currently decide which invoices to Accept vs mark Pending? Is that manual judgment or do you have a process?
4. If a tool auto-matched PAN + invoice number + amount and flagged the three buckets automatically — would that be genuinely useful or do you feel the manual review is necessary anyway?