Ask ten jewellers why their gold savings scheme runs for eleven months and not twelve, and you will get ten versions of the same shrug. "Everyone does eleven." "The twelfth is our gift." "It's the industry standard." All true, and none of them the reason.
The reason is a single clause in the Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Rules, 2014. Rule 2(1)(c)(xii) says that money received as an advance for the supply of goods is not a deposit — provided it is appropriated against that supply within 365 days of receipt. Cross the 365 days and the same money stops being a customer advance and becomes a deposit from the public, which a jewellery company is not licensed to accept.
So the eleventh instalment plus your bonus month is not a marketing invention. It is a compliance boundary dressed up as a discount. The first instalment has to be redeemed inside 365 days, which is why the scheme closes at month twelve and not a day later.
What the rule actually asks of you
Once you see the scheme as an advance-against-goods rather than a savings product, the compliance checklist writes itself. Each of these is a thing your software either records or doesn't:
- The date each instalment was received — because the 365-day clock starts per receipt, not per scheme.
- A redemption that actually happens inside the window, against goods, with a tax invoice — not a refund of cash, and not an open-ended credit balance carried into next year.
- The bonus instalment shown as a discount or as your contribution on the invoice, so the customer's ledger and your books say the same thing.
- A closing entry for every account: redeemed, refunded, or lapsed. An account that is none of the three is the one that shows up in an inspection.
- The HUID of the piece finally handed over, tied back to the scheme account it came from.
There is a second, quieter benefit to treating it as an advance for goods. Under Notification 66/2017 – Central Tax, a registered supplier of goods (outside the composition scheme) does not pay GST on the advance itself. The tax falls at the time of invoice, when the jewellery actually leaves the counter. Advances for services are still taxable on receipt — but a gold scheme, correctly structured, is an advance for goods. That means your monthly collections should not be generating a GST liability month by month; they should be sitting as a liability on your balance sheet until redemption. If your billing software is taxing them at collection, someone is paying tax early on money that isn't revenue yet.
One honest caveat, and I'd rather say it than skip it
The 365-day rule sits in the Companies Act framework, so it bites hardest if you are a private limited company. A great many jewellers are proprietorships or partnerships. That does not make you free — the Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Act, 2019 draws its own outer boundary around who may take money from the public and on what terms, and it applies regardless of what form your firm takes.
I am not your CA and this is not a compliance opinion. What I will say is that the eleven-month design has survived because it keeps the transaction unambiguously on the right side of the line: money in, goods out, inside a year, with paper for every step. Whatever your firm's structure, that is the shape you want your scheme to have. Ask your CA to confirm which rule binds you, then make your software behave as if the stricter one does.
A scheme account with no closing entry is not a customer relationship. It is an open compliance question with a name attached.
Where the software actually fails
Here is the part nobody puts in a brochure. Most jewellers run schemes in a register, a spreadsheet, or a WhatsApp thread with the accountant — and they run billing in something else entirely. The two never meet.
Marg has been the desktop workhorse of Indian jewellery retail for years, and it knows the trade. It handles stock, karat, and billing with a depth that generic tools don't. But it is a desktop product at heart, and a scheme ledger that lives on one machine in the back office is a scheme ledger nobody at the counter can see. Tally is superb accounting software and a poor jewellery counter — it will record the advance correctly if someone tells it to, but it will never remind you that Mrs. Shah's account crosses 365 days next Thursday. myBillBook is clean, cheap, and genuinely useful for straightforward GST billing, which is exactly why it doesn't model a weight-priced, rate-of-the-day, HUID-tagged, scheme-linked sale — that isn't the product it set out to be. And the local desktop tools that many shops still run are usually a single developer's build, maintained until he moves on.
None of that is a scandal. Each of those tools is honest about what it is. The gap is that a gold scheme is simultaneously a billing event, an accounting liability, a compliance clock, and a customer relationship — and it needs one system that holds all four at once.
What we built, and what we didn't
BizRevolt's jewellery workspace treats the scheme as a first-class object, not a note in the margin. Every instalment carries its own receipt date and its own 365-day countdown. The account shows a live maturity date and flags itself before the window closes, not after. Redemption is a real sale — rate of the day, weight, making charges, HUID, tax invoice — with the accumulated advance adjusted on the face of the bill and the bonus month shown for what it is. When the account closes, it closes with a state you can point to in an audit: redeemed, refunded, or lapsed.
The rest of the counter comes with it, because a scheme that doesn't connect to billing is just a spreadsheet with better manners: rate-of-the-day, weight-priced POS, old-gold exchange, per-piece tagged stock, karigar job-work, and an audit trail that reconstructs any day you ask it to.
Pricing is public and it is not per-user roulette: ₹1,499 a month for Counter, ₹3,999 for Growth, ₹7,999 for Chain. No implementation fee, no annual lock-in, no quote-on-request theatre.
We are building this in the open, and the scheme module in particular has been shaped by jewellers telling us what their register actually looks like. If yours does something ours doesn't handle, I want to hear it — that is how the next version gets written. Call or WhatsApp me directly on +91 91 0657 4865 and you'll get a human, usually within about fifteen minutes.