Why most Indian companies leave GST input tax credit on the table when booking travel

Most finance teams assume that once a vendor invoice says "GST included," the input tax credit is automatically theirs to claim. In practice, a meaningful share of that credit gets lost — not through fraud, just through invoice formats that don't hold up against GSTR-2B matching, or bookings routed through an aggregator whose GSTIN doesn't line up with the paying entity.

The two most common leak points we see: hotel invoices billed to the traveller's name instead of the company GSTIN, and flight bookings made through a personal account rather than the corporate travel desk's registered account. Both are fixable before the booking happens — much harder to fix after the trip is over and the invoice is already filed.

This is part of why we send a quarterly ITC summary to the finance teams we work with, rather than just handing over a stack of PDFs at month-end and calling it done.