Most logistics software sold in India was written somewhere else and adjusted afterwards. That is not automatically a problem — a booking is a booking anywhere. It becomes a problem at exactly one place: the invoice, because an Indian tax invoice for freight has rules that exist nowhere else, and software that was taught them late tends to have taught itself the easy ones.
These are the questions worth asking, in the order they will cost you money.
1. Does it know that a transporter’s invoice is not an ordinary invoice?
A business that moves goods by road and issues a consignment note is treated differently from a business that sells goods. The consignment note is what makes the difference, and it carries real consequences — including, for many transporters, an exemption from electronic invoicing that a general trader does not get.
This matters commercially, not just administratively. Software that assumes every invoice must be registered electronically will either block you or push you into a process you are not required to follow. Ask the supplier directly whether their system understands a consignment note as a document type, or whether it is a PDF you attach.
2. Can it put the right tax on the line — and does it know when it cannot?
Whether a supply attracts the combined central-and-state tax or the integrated one depends on where the supply is treated as taking place. For freight that is not always the obvious answer, and the obvious answer is wrong often enough to matter.
There are two honest positions for software here, and one dishonest one. The honest positions are: it computes the place of supply for you, or it does not, so you set the tax on each line and it is recorded faithfully. The dishonest one is software that computes it wrongly and shows no sign of doing so — which you discover at your first assessment.
To be plain about our own: CargoSurge does not compute the place-of-supply split. The accounts for both are there and the tax you choose is carried through to the return correctly, but choosing it is yours. We would rather say that than have you find it out later.
3. What does it do about e-way bills?
A road movement above the threshold needs an e-way bill, and it is generated on the government portal. Some systems generate it for you through an integration; most do not, and quite a few imply they do.
CargoSurge does not generate e-way bills. You raise them on the portal as you do today. If that is a dealbreaker, it should be a dealbreaker before you buy rather than during your first week — which is the whole reason to ask the question in this form: not “do you support e-way bills”, which everyone answers yes to, but “does your software create the bill, or do I still open the portal?”
4. Does the tax rate appear per line, or only as a total?
An invoice carrying more than one rate has to show each of them separately. Software that stores a single tax figure on the invoice header cannot produce that breakdown, and will quietly file a mixed invoice under whichever rate happened to be first.
The test is easy: raise a test invoice with one line at the standard rate and one at nil, and look at what prints. If the document shows one tax figure and one rate, the return built from it will be wrong in the same way.
5. Does it record which exchange rate, on which date?
An Indian forwarder handling export and import work quotes in one currency, pays a partner in another and reports in rupees. Conversion is not the interesting part — every system converts. The question is whether it records the rate it used and the date it used it, because that is what makes the figure defensible.
The failure to look for is a system that quietly treats a missing rate as one-to-one. It produces a number that looks like every other number on the page and is wrong by whatever the real rate was. Ask what happens when no rate is available for a date. “It uses the last one it has” is an answer. “It leaves it blank and tells you” is a better one.
6. Will it tell you what one job earned?
This is the question that separates a logistics ERP from accounting software with a shipment screen bolted on.
When your partner’s invoice arrives three weeks after delivery, it has to attach to the shipment it belongs to. If it lands in a general expense account, you will know your monthly profit and never your per-job profit — and per-job is the number that tells you which lanes and which customers are worth keeping.
Ask to see a single shipment with its sell side and its buy side on one screen, including a cost that arrived after the invoice was raised. Every vendor can show you a margin report over a month. Far fewer can show you one job, honestly, with a late cost on it.
7. Is the road side actually in it, or beside it?
Indian logistics businesses are rarely one thing. A forwarder runs trucks; a transporter does clearing work; both do a little warehousing. If the trucking is a separate product with its own login, then fuel, driver advances and trip costs live outside the job costing — and the per-job profit you just asked about is missing its largest variable cost.
What good looks like
Software written for this region rather than translated into it will let you do all of the following without an export to a spreadsheet:
- Raise a tax invoice that shows each rate separately and prints the consignment note where one applies
- Attach a partner’s invoice, arriving late, to the shipment it belongs to
- Show one shipment’s sell, buy and margin on one screen
- Carry the same reference from quotation through to invoice
- Record which exchange rate was used, and on which date
- Tell you plainly what it does not do
That last one is not a courtesy. In this market the gap between what software claims about Indian tax and what it does is the single most expensive thing you can fail to check before signing.
This article describes the general position and is not tax advice. Thresholds, exemptions and filing obligations depend on your registration and turnover — confirm yours with your accountant.