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How to read a compliance calendar without missing anything
Most missed filings are not hard questions — they are dates nobody was watching. How to read a statutory calendar so the quiet months do not catch you out.
31stFile · Chartered Accountants
Example article. This was written to demonstrate the insights section and has not been reviewed by a partner. It describes obligations already published on this site and states no new statutory position.
Almost no penalty we see comes from a genuinely hard technical question. They come from a date nobody was watching.
That is an unglamorous claim, and it is the reason this firm publishes its compliance calendar in full rather than keeping it as an internal working document. If the failure mode is attention rather than knowledge, then the useful thing to hand someone is not an explanation — it is the list.
The five that never change
Of the seventy dated obligations we track for FY 2026-27, thirty-five of them — exactly half — are the same five filings repeating every month:
- TDS and TCS deposit
- GSTR-1
- PF and ESI contribution
- GSTR-3B
- Professional tax deposit
If you file all five every month, you have handled half the calendar by volume. This is genuinely good news, and it is also the trap: because these five recur, they build a habit, and the habit creates a feeling of being on top of things that the annual obligations quietly fall outside of.
The quiet months are the dangerous ones
Seven of the twelve months in FY 2026-27 carry nothing but those five recurring filings. May, June, August and November 2026, and January, February and March 2027, have no annual or half-yearly obligation falling due at all.
A quiet month feels like being ahead. It is more usefully read as preparation time for the month that follows, because the busy months are very busy:
- April 2026 — eight filings, the heaviest month of the year
- July 2026 — the non-audit return and the Q1 TDS statement both on the 31st
- September 2026 — the tax audit report and Director KYC both on the 30th
- October 2026 — the audit-case return and the transfer pricing report both on the 31st
Notice the pattern in the last three: in each case two unrelated obligations, owed to different authorities, happen to share a single date. That is where things get missed. Not because either is difficult, but because one of them consumes the week and the other is not on the same list.
Read it by trigger, not by date
The second mistake is reading a calendar as though every line applies to you. Most do not. An obligation attaches for one of three reasons, and it is worth knowing which:
- It attaches to the entity. A private limited company files its annual return whether or not it traded. Nothing switches these on or off.
- It attaches to a registration. Hold a TAN and the TDS obligations follow. Register for GST and the monthly returns follow. Take on one employee and payroll filings follow — in every state where you have staff.
- It attaches at a turnover threshold. These are off until you cross a band, then on from that point, and the crossing is easy to miss because nothing announces it.
The third category is the one that catches growing businesses. Revenue moves gradually; obligations arrive all at once.
What to do with this
Take your entity type and your registrations, and mark which of the seventy dates actually bind you. Our compliance checker does that part, and the entity checklists show the standing set for each structure.
Then put the busy months in a diary that is not this website. April, July, September and October are the ones to protect.
This article describes the obligations in our own tracked dataset for FY 2026-27. It is general guidance, not advice on your specific facts, and our dataset is not an exhaustive statement of Indian statutory law. Check your position with us, or with your own adviser, before relying on it for a filing.