GST Billing for Restaurants in India: What Your POS Must Actually Print

If your billing software cannot produce a clean GST invoice and a matching summary at month end, someone in your business is rebuilding that data by hand. This is what a restaurant POS needs to handle, and where the usual gaps appear.

Which GST rate applies to your restaurant

Rates depend on the type of establishment rather than the dish. Standalone restaurants generally bill at 5% without input tax credit, while restaurants inside hotels above a specified room-tariff threshold bill at 18% with credit available. Outdoor catering and certain premises are treated differently again.

The rates and thresholds are revised from time to time, so treat the current notification or your accountant as the authority — not a blog post, and not a default buried in your software. What matters for choosing a POS is that the rate is configurable per item or category, not hard-coded. A system that cannot be changed when a rate changes becomes a liability.

What has to appear on the invoice

A GST invoice is not just a total. At minimum your printed bill should carry:

• Your registered business name, address and GSTIN
• A unique, sequential invoice number that does not reset arbitrarily
• Date and time of supply
• Line items with description, quantity and rate
• Taxable value, with CGST and SGST shown separately (or IGST where applicable)
• The total in figures

Splitting CGST and SGST into their own lines matters. A bill that shows a single blended "GST 5%" line is harder to defend and harder to reconcile.

Inclusive or exclusive pricing — decide once

Menu prices can either include tax or have it added at the bill. Both are legitimate; mixing them is where restaurants get into trouble.

If your menu board says ₹200 and you intend that to be the final price, your POS must work backwards from ₹200 to find the taxable value and the tax component. If tax is added on top, ₹200 becomes ₹210 at 5%. Guests notice the difference, and so does your revenue reporting if the setting is wrong for even a few items.

Set this deliberately when you configure the menu, check a printed bill against a calculator once, and then leave it alone.

The reports you need at filing time

Day-to-day billing is only half the job. At the end of the period you need to state how much tax you collected, and you should be able to produce that without exporting every bill into a spreadsheet.

Look for a POS that gives you a GST report totalling tax collected across a date range, broken down by rate, alongside a general tax report and a daily sales report you can reconcile against your bank deposits. If the numbers in those three reports do not agree with each other, the software is not doing its job.

Common mistakes worth avoiding

• Bill numbers that restart. If each counter or each branch generates its own sequence with no distinguishing prefix, you end up with duplicate invoice numbers on the same day.
• Discounts applied after tax. A discount generally reduces the taxable value, so it must be applied before tax is computed, not deducted from the gross total.
• Free items and staff meals billed at zero. These still need to be recorded somewhere, or your stock and your sales stop agreeing.
• Cancelled bills that vanish. A cancelled invoice should remain visible with its reason, not disappear from the sequence.

How MealNix handles it

Tax rates are set per item or category, with a per-restaurant choice of inclusive or exclusive pricing. Bills print CGST and SGST separately. The GST report totals collected tax for any date range, and sits alongside the tax report, the daily and summary sales reports, and a cancelled-order report that keeps voided bills visible rather than deleting them.