Videographer in Daman. Weddings in Goa. ₹1.78 lakh GST demand.
🎬 Hardik Joshi, 39, runs Joshi Weddings Studio in Nani Daman, a six-person destination wedding-videography studio. His clients are wealthy Gujarati families from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Vadodara—budgets of ₹4–12 lakh for three-day cinematic wedding films. Twelve weddings in 2024. He invoiced all of them from Daman (where his studio is) as intra-state GST: 9% CGST + 9% SGST. Ten weddings were in Goa, two in Maharashtra. In April 2025, a GST DRC-01A notice arrived: his invoices should have been IGST (inter-state), not intra-state. Back-tax: ₹1,78,640.
🚨 The problem
A wedding-videographer thinks of where they sit: "I'm in Daman, my invoice is from Daman, so GST is Daman's." A GST officer reads Section 12(3) of the IGST Act: "For services related to an event, the place of supply is the location of the event." These two readings collide. Most videographers, photographers, and event coordinators bundle the invoicing based on their office location without understanding that place-of-supply rules apply differently to event-based services. By the time the notice arrives, twelve invoices are exposed and reversing them costs cash and compliance time.
🚀 How GabFORGE helped
Hardik's 12-year-old daughter had installed an agent on the family tablet. Hardik typed in Gujarati: "My wedding videography is in Goa, but I invoiced from Daman. The GST officer says it's wrong. What's the place-of-supply rule?" The agent asked for the DRC-01A PDF and replied:
- 🔍 Located Section 12(3). "The place of supply of services is where the service is consumed — the recipient's location. For event-based services, that means the event location. If you shot the wedding in Goa, place of supply is Goa — not where your studio is."
- 💬 Analysed the exposure. Pulled Hardik's twelve 2024 invoices. Ten Goa weddings (all mis-classified as intra-state), two Maharashtra weddings (same issue). Calculated that ten invoices would be reclassified from CGST+SGST to IGST. "The total tax amount is the same (18%), but the classification is wrong. This is a filing error, not a tax evasion."
- 📞 Guided the response. Showed how to structure a revised GSTR-1 reconciliation acknowledging the place-of-supply rule, filing amended returns showing the correct IGST treatment, and a brief position note citing Section 12(3) explicitly.
Hardik's CA filed the revised GSTR-1 and a position note. Within sixty days, the GST Authority acknowledged the correction. The officer accepted the reclassification as a filing correction, not a demand-notice scenario. No penalties applied. The studio updated its invoicing template for future weddings: event location determines place of supply, not studio location.
🇮🇳 Why this matters
Section 12(3) has been clear since the IGST Act's 2017 launch. The problem is that a founder sitting in a studio in Daman does not automatically translate "event location" into their specific situation until the notice arrives. An agent that reads Section 12(3) and explains the specific implications—that your Goa wedding creates a Goa place of supply—can turn a ₹1.78 lakh demand into a correctable filing issue.
The long version has Hardik's realisation that he'd never questioned the rule, the agent pulling all twelve 2024 invoices to map the exposure, and how a Section 12(3) position note converted the demand into a filing correction.