Home › Purchase vs 2A vs 2B
The whole ITC position, in one view
A two-way reconciliation tells you an invoice is missing. It cannot tell you whether the supplier filed late or never filed at all — and those two facts call for opposite actions. This one places every purchase invoice across all three sources.
| Where the invoice appears | Docs | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Books, 2A and 2B | 2,841 | Claim |
| Books and 2A, not 2B | 63 | Defer |
| Books only | 19 | At risk |
| 2B, not in books | 11 | Book it |
| 2A only | 7 | Follow up |
Illustration; figures invented. The live screen states every bucket with its value and its document count, and flags the at-risk buckets.
Why two sources are not enough
Compare the purchase register with the GSTR-2B alone and a missing invoice has one explanation: it is not there. Compare it with the 2A alone and you see credits that are visible but not yet available.
Put all three side by side and the same missing invoice splits into two completely different cases:
- In 2A, not yet in 2B — the supplier filed after the cut-off. It is a timing difference. Defer the credit; it will come.
- In neither — the supplier has not declared the invoice at all. It is a supplier default. The credit is at risk and somebody needs to be telephoned.
Those two calls for action are opposite, and a two-way reconciliation cannot tell them apart.
Every invoice lands in exactly one bucket
Each purchase document is classified by its presence across the three sources, and each bucket carries its own recommended action. The buckets whose action is a red flag are marked as such, so a screen with three thousand matched invoices does not bury the eleven that need work.
GSTR-2A against GSTR-2B on its own
There is also a straight 2A-versus-2B comparison at invoice level, for when the question is only which credits sit in the dynamic ledger but not yet in the period’s static snapshot — late-filed or post-cut-off, visible but not yet available — and what sits in the 2B but not the 2A.
2A and 2B are keyed differently, and it matters. The 2A is keyed to the supplier’s return period; the 2B to the availability window. So the April 2B always carries the previous March. A comparison that treats them as the same period will report a difference that is not one.
Purchases pair on identity, then on value. Matching purely on exact value faked most of the gaps in an early version of this screen. The pairing runs on identity first, then exact value, then the nearest value within a rupee — and a sub-rupee difference is reported as rounding short or excess, not as a gap.
Also on the purchase side
Per-supplier netting
Credit notes netted against the supplier’s invoices before the ITC gap is stated, so a note never presents as a missing bill.
Books, 2B and 3B
The three-way tie-out between what you booked, what the 2B made available and what the 3B actually availed.
Prior-year credits
A supplier who declares late puts the credit in a year the purchase was not booked in. Those documents are separated out and named, with the ITC-available flag counted where the 2B carries it.
See where your credit actually stands
One GSTIN and a thousand invoice rows, free. Put a quarter of purchases through it and read the buckets.