Walk into almost any jewellery shop in India and you will find a savings scheme running quietly at the counter. The customer pays a fixed amount every month for eleven months, the shop adds the twelfth, and at the end the family walks out with jewellery worth roughly twelve installments. It is the single best footfall engine a jeweller has: it locks in a customer for a year and brings them back to buy. It is also the part of the business most likely to be structured in a way that quietly breaks the law. This post is about the one rule that decides which side of the line you are on.

Why the scheme is almost always "11+1"

The eleven-plus-one shape is not a marketing gimmick, it is a compliance decision most jewellers made without realising it. When a customer hands you money every month against gold they will take later, the law has to decide what that money is. Is it an advance for goods you will supply? Or is it a deposit you are collecting from the public? The answer changes everything, and the tenure of your scheme is what tips it one way or the other.

The 365-day line between an advance and a deposit

Under the Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Rules, 2014, money a company receives is broadly treated as a "deposit" unless it falls inside a specific exemption. One of those exemptions, in Rule 2(1)(c)(xii), covers an advance received for the supply of goods, as long as that advance is appropriated against the supply within 365 days from the date you accepted it. Collect for eleven months, redeem in the twelfth, and you sit comfortably inside that one-year window as an advance for goods. Let the scheme drift to eighteen or twenty-four months, or let a customer's balance sit unredeemed past a year, and the same money can be re-characterised as a deposit, which a private jewellery company is simply not allowed to accept from the public. That single date is why almost every scheme you see runs under twelve months.

We are a software company, not your auditor, and the structure of these schemes has been argued in court more than once; some benches have treated a voluntary shop scheme as a plain commercial transaction. The safe reading, and the one most CAs will give you, is to keep every scheme inside the 365-day window, keep it strictly redeemable in goods, and keep the paperwork clean enough that nobody ever has to argue about it at all.

Tenure under twelve months, with redemption in gold or jewellery, not cash back.
Every installment adjusted against the final purchase within 365 days of the first payment.
A signed scheme terms sheet per customer, not a verbal promise at the counter.
No single installment of Rs 2 lakh or more accepted in cash, which Section 269ST of the Income-tax Act caps.
A per-customer ledger showing exactly what was paid, when, and what it was redeemed against.

GST: charge it at redemption, not on the installment

Here is the part that trips up even careful shops. For goods, GST is not payable when you receive an advance; the government withdrew that requirement, so no tax is due on the monthly scheme installment itself. GST falls due only when you actually supply the jewellery, at redemption: 3% on the gold value and 5% on making charges, on the invoice you raise that day. If your billing software is quietly booking a tax liability every month as installments come in, you are paying GST early on money that has not become a sale yet. If it never raises the tax at redemption, you are under-charging. The scheme ledger and the GST invoice have to be joined up.

Where the paper trail actually breaks

In practice the compliance risk is rarely the idea of the scheme, it is the record-keeping. A customer pays some months by UPI, one month in cash, misses a month, then tops up two together. Someone notes it in a diary or a spare Excel sheet. A year later the family comes to redeem, the diary is half-legible, and nobody can cleanly show that this pile of money was always an advance against these goods, adjusted inside the window. That is the exact gap an assessing officer or an auditor pokes at. The scheme was fine; the evidence was not.

A year-long relationship with a customer is worth protecting with a ledger that still reads clearly twelve months later.

Marg, Tally and the counter diary, named fairly

Most jewellers reading this already run something. Marg and Tally are genuinely capable accounting products, and for GST returns and books they do their job well. But they were built as accounting engines, not as scheme managers: the monthly-installment relationship, the redemption-inside-365-days clock, and the per-customer scheme ledger tend to live outside them, in a separate register or a staff member's memory. Desktop tools also stay on one computer in one shop; the moment you have two branches, or a manager who wants to check scheme balances from home, the single-machine model starts to hurt. None of this makes them bad software. It makes them the wrong shape for this one job.

What we built into BizRevolt for schemes

We built the scheme as a first-class object, not a spreadsheet bolted onto billing. When a customer joins, BizRevolt records the terms, starts the 365-day clock, and tracks every installment against it whatever the mode of payment. It flags a scheme drifting toward the one-year line before it crosses it. At redemption it pulls the collected amount straight onto a GST-correct invoice, so tax lands at supply and not before. Every customer has a ledger that still reads cleanly a year later, and because it is cloud-based, you can see scheme balances across branches from one screen.

A per-customer scheme ledger that survives a year of messy, mixed-mode payments.
An automatic 365-day countdown, with alerts before a scheme risks becoming a deposit.
Redemption that flows into a GST-correct invoice, with tax at supply and not on the installment.
Multi-branch visibility, so a scheme opened at one shop is honoured and tracked at another.

The scheme is not the risk. The undocumented scheme is.

None of this is exotic. It is the difference between a scheme that quietly builds a year-long relationship and one that becomes an awkward conversation with an auditor. Our pricing is public: Rs 1,499 for the Counter plan, Rs 3,999 for Growth, and Rs 7,999 for a multi-branch Chain, with no long lock-in to try it. If you want to talk it through before moving a single customer over, message me on WhatsApp or call the shop line at +91 91 0657 4865 and we will walk through your current scheme setup together. This is being built in the open, for Indian jewellers, one honest feature at a time.