Domain registration is a small line item that creates a disproportionate amount of untidiness, because of how it is typically bought: by one person, on a card, renewing automatically, often from a registrar outside India.
Three problems, all of them procedural
The invoice is not in the company's name
Someone registered the domain years ago on a personal account. Renewals bill to that card and get reimbursed as an expense. The invoice carries no company GSTIN, so no input credit is available — and more importantly, the company does not legally control its own primary digital asset.
The tax loss on a domain is trivial. The ownership exposure is not. Domains registered to a departed employee's personal account are a recurring and genuinely painful problem.
Foreign registrars bring reverse charge
Where the registrar is outside India, the invoice arrives with no Indian tax on it. As with any import of services, the recipient is generally liable to account for tax under reverse charge and may then claim credit where output is taxable.
The amounts are small, which is precisely why the obligation gets ignored. Individually negligible; across a portfolio of domains, SSL certificates and small SaaS subscriptions renewing monthly, the aggregate is no longer negligible — and it is exactly the category of spend an audit samples, because it is where process is weakest.
Auto-renewal removes the moment anyone would notice
An annual renewal charged silently to a card never passes across a desk. There is no approval, no invoice filed, no entry beyond a card statement line. This is how organisations end up not knowing which domains they own or when they expire.
What good looks like
- One corporate account holding every domain, with the company's GSTIN on file and billing to a company payment method.
- A register listing each domain, its expiry, its registrar and who is responsible. A spreadsheet is fine; not having one is not.
- Foreign-billed renewals flagged to whoever computes the monthly liability, in the same routine as other imported services.
- Registrar lock and two-factor authentication enabled. Unrelated to tax, and more likely to matter.
- Expiry alerts to a shared mailbox, not one person's inbox.
Consolidating with an Indian registrar
For an Indian business there is a straightforward case for holding domains with a registrar that bills from India: the invoice carries GST you can claim directly, there is no reverse charge to remember, payment is in rupees without card conversion, and support is in your timezone.
Transfers are not difficult — unlock, obtain the authorisation code, initiate at the new registrar — but do them well before expiry. A transfer attempted in the last few days of a registration is how domains lapse.
While you are at it: the related renewals
The same problems attach to SSL certificates, email services and small SaaS subscriptions. All small, all recurring, all frequently on somebody's card. An annual review of every recurring charge under a few thousand rupees usually finds subscriptions nobody uses, invoices in the wrong name, and at least one service whose owner has left.
GST rates, turnover thresholds and reporting windows change. Verify the current position on the GST portal or with your tax advisor before making a decision based on this.
About the author. Kislay Chandan has worked with schools since 2014. Rather than gathering requirements from the outside, he worked inside a school to see what actually goes wrong day to day, and built what he found into the software. He still works with Shemrock Glitters in Patna — most changes to the product start with something that came up there.
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