New Delhi: Mitul Rakshit is the co-founder of Café Indica, a lifestyle brand which specializes in interior designing. But with GST launch, Rakshit and her team have put their core work on hold and are busy hunting for young B.Com graduates who are suddenly in high demand.
B.Com is considered the entry level degree for accounting and finance related jobs. Usually, there is an oversupply of such graduates and only top 5-10% find good jobs. Others have to go for either specialized trainings or higher studies, including Chartered Accountancy and MBA in finance.
Goods and Services Tax (GST) has come as a boon for commerce graduates, who are in high demand to do first level of entries in GST Network software on behalf of businesses and help them transit to new platform seamlessly.
“B.com graduates are the need of the hour,” Rakshit told News18. From ensuring that different tax slabs on different items are followed as per rules to uploading and updating invoices on GSTN software, from timely filing various returns to looking at legal compliance matters, B.Com graduates are the go-to people nowadays.
“You can’t go to CA with every small query and work. CA looks at the bigger picture, but he or she needs a team of B.Com graduates to the basic work. Either organizations are hiring B.Com graduates on their payrolls or their CA is proving such manpower for a fee,” said Saurabh Aggarwal, co-founder of Fitso, a Gurgaon-based fitness solutions provider.
Rakshit concurs. “With the GST implemented, there will be more accounting and compliance related work. And we prefer having in-house people.” The demand for the commerce graduates is increasing by the day, she said. “A Chartered Accountant will not be doing day-to-day filing, which will increase under GST, and we would be hiring commerce graduates.”
Nine returns would have to be filed every quarter under GST, compared to one return a quarter under the older regime. Also, with GST the use of technology has become mandatory. As the whole system is online, there will be many challenges in the initial stage, increasing the “clerical work”, said Chartered Accountant Varun Goel, partner at NVA and Co. “This workload is forcing many people in the industry to hire B.Com graduates to manage the laborious backend work,” he explained.
When asked, Goel said till six months ago it was very easy to find fresh commerce graduates for a salary of about Rs 15,000 a month. Now, the minimum salary for fresh graduates is Rs 20,000 a month. “If you are bright and have read up on GST, starting salary can go up to Rs 30,000 a month,” said Goel.
Another thing in demand is crash courses on GST for commerce graduates. “As of now, we are facing a new system with not much preparedness at hand. Even though the need for B.Com graduates is increasing, we have to deal with the truth that they too won’t be trained for GST. There are no institutes either to impart such knowledge,” said Suneet Agarwal, Chartered Accountant and partner at DD Agarwal & Co.
Goel said he and many others have been reading up on GST for months and now there is a need for everyone who knows the subject to help in raising awareness by training more people.
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