Restaurant GST, month by month: GSTR-1, Table 13 and GSTR-3B without the panic.

A regular dealer files GSTR-1, which lists what you sold and the documents you issued, and GSTR-3B, which is the summary you pay on. A composition dealer files neither and sends CMP-08 every quarter instead. Which of the two you are was decided when you registered, and it changes the whole calendar below.

Registration itself starts at ₹20 lakh of aggregate turnover for a service supplier, ₹10 lakh in the special category states; the ₹40 lakh figure people quote is the goods limit and does not apply to a restaurant (Tax Garden, 31 August 2026, read 2026-09-09). Composition is open up to ₹1.5 crore of aggregate turnover across your PAN, at a flat 5% of turnover with no input tax credit and no inter-state supply, and it fits badly with aggregator-routed sales (Legal Suvidha, 2 August 2026, read 2026-09-09).

The rate on the bill is 5% without input tax credit for a standalone restaurant, air conditioned or not, dine-in or parcel (Busy, 14 August 2026, read 2026-09-09). That side of it, including what the bill has to print, is the GST bill post, and this page picks up where that one stops.

Read the law at the tax publishers, not here. ClearTax and Taxmann keep the return-by-return detail current, and both are free to read. A POS company is the wrong place to learn a section number. What it can tell you is what your own till has to prove when the return asks, which is the rest of this page.

GSTR-1 by the 11th, GSTR-3B by the 20th. The order is not a preference: filing GSTR-1 first has been mandatory since 1 January 2022, and in 2026 the liability in GSTR-3B is auto-populated from GSTR-1 and largely locked, so what you put in the first return decides what you pay in the second (Legal Suvidha, 1 September 2026, read 2026-09-09).

Sources for the table: ClearTax, 7 May 2026 for GSTR-1 and the QRMP date, and RegisterKaro, 9 July 2026 for the GSTR-3B and CMP-08 dates, both read 2026-09-09. Due dates get extended by notification more often than anyone would like, so check the current CBIC calendar in the week you file. The annual GSTR-4 is the one date where published sources openly disagree, 30 April against 30 June, so take that from your CA.

The filing you probably do not owe. A restaurant does not file the FSSAI annual return. FSSAI's own licensing FAQ says the annual return provision is not applicable to food services at present, and Form D1, due 31 May, is for manufacturers, importers, repackers and relabellers (FSSAI Licensing FAQs, read 2026-09-09). Several commercial compliance blogs say every licence holder must file it. For a restaurant that is wrong, and the late fee they quote, ₹100 a day, is real enough that people pay for a filing they never owed.

Table 13 of GSTR-1 is called documents issued, and it reports what you issued in the period as ranges: from this number to that number, how many, how many cancelled. Because it is a range, the portal can see a hole in your serial sequence without ever looking at a single bill. It has been mandatory since the May 2025 return period, under the GSTN advisory of 1 May 2025, and it covers invoices, credit and debit notes, receipt vouchers and delivery challans (Taxmann, read 2026-09-09).

For a restaurant that turns one long-standing habit into a liability. Re-typed bills, a second book of numbers for parcel orders, an evening billed from a phone nobody set up properly: each puts a number in the world your return cannot account for. The bill on the screen is the document, so being able to open one and read its number back matters.

A reprint is a copy and says so: the register stamps it DUPLICATE. The related rule is Rule 48(1)(b) of the CGST Rules, under which an invoice for services is made in duplicate, marked ORIGINAL FOR RECIPIENT and DUPLICATE FOR SUPPLIER (CGST rules, chapter VI, read 2026-09-09). Our stamp is not that copy set: it goes on a reprint of the guest's bill so a second copy cannot be handed over as a fresh one. A guest who wants last Tuesday's bill gets it from the Orders screen, whose Earlier tab takes a date and shows one business day at a time.

The register's day close lists "Bills issued today" for each till: the first and last number, how many were issued, how many cancelled, the net, and a warning if a number ever goes missing, which the way the register mints them should make impossible. That is the same shape Table 13 wants, produced every night by the machine that made the numbers. What it cannot see is a number some other book issued. A gap found at closing has a person and a story attached to it. The same gap found five weeks later has neither.

A missing number is not automatically a theft. It can be a cancelled bill, a second till nobody realised was billing, or a printer that ate a slip after the number was spent. What the return wants is the count of cancellations, not silence, so the only bad answer is the one nobody wrote down. Petpooja's day-end guide makes the same point from the accounting side: the day-end figure feeds the ledger entries and the GST returns you file (Petpooja, 17 July 2026, read 2026-09-09).

One boundary to keep straight at month end: the day close follows your trading day, which starts at 4am until you move it in the dashboard's Settings, so the last night of the month and the first night of the next are two separate closes. Read both before you send anything, and see the day-end report post for the rest of the nightly routine.

None of these is exotic. Each one is something a busy restaurant does to save thirty seconds, and each one shows up later as a number that cannot be explained.

• Editing a settled bill. An issued invoice carries a serial number that is reported as a range, so correcting one by editing it breaks the series. The correction is a credit note or a fresh bill (CGST rules, chapter VI, read 2026-09-09). On the register a settled bill offers View bill, Reprint receipt and Refund, and refunding needs the amount typed again, then a manager's or owner's PIN.
• Small orders with no bill and no day-end invoice. You may skip a tax invoice on a supply under ₹200 to an unregistered customer who does not want one, only if a consolidated tax invoice is issued at the close of each day, under section 31(3)(b) with Rule 46 (ClearTax, read 2026-09-09). Most till counters remember the first half of that sentence. EasyKOT does not issue that consolidated invoice, so bill every order, however small.
• Reprints handed over as fresh bills. The copy is a duplicate and has to look like one, which is why the register stamps it. Two clean originals of the same meal are the oldest way an evening gets counted twice.
• Skipping a nil month. GSTR-3B is due even when nothing was sold (ClearTax, read 2026-09-09). A shut month costs nothing to file and a lot to explain later.
• A service charge added by default. The CCPA guidelines of 4 July 2022 say it may not be added automatically or under another name, and that it shall not be added to the food bill with GST levied on the total (CCPA guidelines). The Delhi High Court upheld them on 28 March 2025, and printing the charge on the menu does not make it voluntary (PIB, both read 2026-09-09). A tip a guest chooses to leave is untouched by any of it.

Send the month's sales with the tax split, the bill number ranges for each till with the cancelled count, the expenses that carry GST, and a line about any gap and what it turned out to be. That is the whole handover. Everything else your accountant needs, he already has.

All four are readable without waiting for anyone: the Sales tab holds net sales, discounts, refunds, write-offs and the payment mix for the range you pick, the Expenses tab the vendor bills, and the register's day close the per-till series for each night. There is no invoice PDF export today, so what passes between you and your CA is numbers, which in practice is what he asks for. Individual bills stay retrievable from the Orders screen by date.

Keep the records for 72 months from the due date of the annual return, under section 36 of the CGST Act, and longer while an appeal or investigation is running (Taxguru, read 2026-09-09). Six years is long enough that paper alone is a bad plan.

If the weekly side of this is what actually slips, the weekly close is its own post, and setting up your GST identity and first bill is a guide. EasyKOT is ₹299 a month or ₹2,990 a year, with 18% GST as its own line, and the first three months are free with no card. The part worth trying first is the day close: read your own bill series for one week and see whether it is unbroken.