GST when you sell tickets to your own film

Two taxes, and only one of them is ours

Almost every confused conversation about GST and film tickets is one of these two questions wearing the other’s clothes. Separate them and the rest is easy.

• Tax on the ticket. A viewer buys access to your film. That is a supply of services and GST applies to it. On watchmycreation the platform is the supplier of record for that sale: we charge the tax inside the displayed price, we remit it, and the tax invoice for it is ours to raise rather than yours.
• Tax on what you earn. Money reaches your bank account as a payout. Whether that is itself something you must account for, and what you must file, depends on you — your registration status, your turnover, whatever else you do for a living. We do not decide it and we withhold nothing against it.

The first is settled, priced into the ticket and not yours to administer. The second is genuinely yours, and the only honest advice on this page is to put it to a chartered accountant before your first payout rather than after your first notice.

The tax on the ticket

Ticket prices here are tax-inclusive, and that choice has consequences worth understanding. A ₹ ticket means ₹20 leaves the viewer’s account — not that amount plus tax at the last screen. Inside it sits ₹3.05 of GST at 18%, and what is left is the taxable value.

Be careful about what that figure governs, because this is the thing most often got wrong about a model like this. The taxable value is what remains after tax; it is not the base the other deductions are worked out from. The payment gateway takes its share of the whole amount collected, tax included, with GST charged on its own fee in turn. Streaming and the platform fee are flat rupee amounts — so much per minute of runtime, and a fixed fee per ticket — and do not scale with the price at all. The full arithmetic of a ticket sets out all four in the order they come off.

It is also what to check when you compare platforms. A tax-exclusive quote flatters the price you set and says nothing about the price a viewer is actually asked for; here those are the same number, and the tax inside it was never yours either way.

The tax is not a deduction from your side of the ticket in any meaningful sense — it was never yours. It belonged to the government the moment the viewer tapped pay, and the platform is the party that hands it over. You can run your own price and runtime through the earnings calculator, which uses the same function that settles the real payment.

The tax on what you earn

Here is exactly what the platform does and does not do, stated plainly, because vagueness here is how people get hurt.

• We do not deduct GST from a payout. Your payout is the sum of the ledger rows settled to you, and nothing is netted off for tax.
• We do not raise an invoice on your behalf. There is no self-billing arrangement, and signing up did not authorise one — which means that if you are registered, raising whatever invoice your own position requires is yours to do. That is more paperwork for you than a self-billing platform would leave, and it is the trade for us not guessing at your registration status.
• We do not deduct anything from a payout today. Whether a platform in our position should be withholding tax on what it pays out is a live question that turns on your status and on how much you earn in a year, and it is one to put to your accountant rather than to us. If it ever changes, your payout statements will show it before your bank does.
• Your GSTIN and your state are recorded on request, not on a form. The studio’s profile page has no field for either yet, so write to us with them and we will put them on your record. The one place they are used is the tax invoice for your listing fee: the GSTIN appears on it so your accountant can decide about input credit, and the state decides which heads the tax is charged under.

That is a deliberate stopping point, not an unfinished feature. GST on a payout is a different taxable event from GST on a ticket, and the answer depends on facts only you have. A platform that guesses at a filmmaker’s registration status and starts deducting on the strength of the guess creates a problem for someone who did not ask for one. We would rather record the fact than assume the consequence.

What we do instead is give your accountant something to work from: earnings broken down by film and by month in your dashboard, with the platform fee shown apart from everything else deducted, computed from the ledger as it stood at each sale and with refunds already netted into the figures. Take that to a CA and the questions — must you register, what do you raise, when do you file — are usually quick to answer.

You will notice what is missing here: a registration threshold, a filing deadline, and any rate other than the one on our own invoices. Those move, and being confidently wrong about somebody else’s tax is the worst outcome available to a page like this.

The listing fee is its own supply

Putting a film on sale carries a listing fee, starting at ₹99 for the shortest runtimes and rising with length, which keeps it listed for 90 days and is paid again to renew. The current bands are on the pricing page. That fee is a supply to you, so it works the other way round from a ticket: we are the supplier, you are the recipient, and the tax invoice is yours.

The fee is GST-inclusive too. Your name, and your GSTIN and state where we hold them, are snapshotted onto that invoice as it is issued, and a later change to your record cannot restate a document already filed — so if you want your GSTIN on it, tell us before you pay rather than after. Whether you can then take input credit on it is a question for your accountant.

What a tax invoice has to carry

Rule 46 of the CGST Rules sets out what a tax invoice must contain. Some of the particulars are conditional rather than universal — an unregistered recipient’s name and address are required only above a value threshold or on request, which is why a ticket invoice here shows an unregistered recipient and a masked contact — but the spine of the list is fixed:

• The supplier’s legal name, address and GSTIN.
• A serial number, unique within the financial year.
• The date of issue.
• The recipient’s particulars, including their GSTIN where they have one and the rules call for it.
• A description of what was supplied and its SAC code.
• The taxable value.
• The rate and amount of tax under each head — central and state where the supply is within a state, integrated where it crosses one.
• The place of supply.
• The total.

A tax invoice is filed against a ticket sale and against a listing fee once the platform’s own registration details are recorded against the invoice series. Until they are, nothing is issued and a receipt simply carries no invoice link — a tax document carrying a plausible-looking placeholder GSTIN would be worse than no document at all — and anything sold in the meantime is filed retrospectively when they are.

Numbers then run in an unbroken series per financial year: no gaps, no reuse, including when a payment is retried. A series with holes in it is an audit finding, and a reused number is worse.

The invoice is filed from exact paise rather than rounded rupees, which sounds fussy until you see the alternative: a ₹20 ticket is ₹16.95 plus ₹3.05, and a document rounding both halves to whole rupees would not add up to its own total.

A viewer’s invoice is linked from their receipt screen, at a stable address that opens the document for whoever holds it. Your own listing-fee invoices have no home in the studio yet — they are issued on our side, so ask us and we will send you the document.

Place of supply, and why ours usually says the supplier’s

Whether GST is charged as central plus state tax or as integrated tax depends on where the supply is made, which for a service like this means where the recipient is. We do not capture it, and we will explain why rather than pretend it is not a gap.

Checkout here is one tap with no viewer account, and the way a UPI payment actually reaches you depends on it staying that short. A state dropdown in front of someone buying a single film would cost more abandoned checkouts than it buys accuracy.

So when the recipient’s address is not on record, the place of supply is the supplier’s location, under section 12(2)(b)(ii) of the IGST Act — and the invoice prints that reason on its face, alongside a field recording which of the two routes it took, so nobody is silently assumed to live where we do. There is no state control in the checkout sheet, so in practice every ticket invoice takes that route. A viewer who needs a different state recorded against theirs should write to us rather than look for a field that is not there.

Your own listing-fee invoice can do better, because you have an account with us: it uses the state code on your filmmaker record, and falls back to the supplier’s location only if we hold none.

Refunds produce a credit note, never an edit

When a ticket is refunded, the invoice is not altered. A separate numbered credit note is issued that references it, and the invoice stands as filed. That is how the law expects a reversal to work and it is also simply safer: a document that can be edited after the fact is a document nobody can rely on.

Two details matter if you ever reconcile one. A credit note takes its tax heads from the invoice’s place of supply, not today’s — integrated tax reversed against an invoice that charged central and state tax would not cancel. And credit notes against a single invoice can never exceed it in total, so however many partial refunds are issued they sum to the invoice and not a paisa more.

Published by Sajai Digital, which operates watchmycreation. We describe how our own platform works and what Indian law requires of it; this is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rates and rules change. Check anything that matters with a professional. Something wrong on this page? Write to support@watchmycreation.com and we will fix it.