Both GSTR-2A and GSTR-2B pull from the same underlying data — your suppliers’ GSTR-1 filings — which is exactly why the two get confused. They answer different questions, and only one of them is what your ITC claims are actually reconciled against.
GSTR-2A: a live, moving view
GSTR-2A is dynamic. It updates continuously as suppliers file or amend their GSTR-1 returns, even for periods that have technically closed. Pull it today and pull it again next week and the numbers can differ, because a supplier who filed late or amended a return changes what shows up. That makes it useful as an ongoing view of what’s been reported against your GSTIN, but unreliable as a fixed point to reconcile a specific tax period against — the ground keeps shifting under it.
GSTR-2B: a static, monthly snapshot
GSTR-2B is generated once a month and then frozen. It draws on GSTR-1 filings up to a fixed cutoff date, and doesn’t change afterward regardless of what suppliers do later. That stability is the entire point — it’s what the GST portal itself intends businesses to use for determining eligible input tax credit for a given period, precisely because it won’t move under you mid-reconciliation.
Why the distinction matters for ITC
Claiming input tax credit against a moving target creates a reconciliation problem that never fully closes — a supplier amendment three months later can retroactively change what GSTR-2A said, but your books for that period are already closed. GSTR-2B avoids that by design: what it says for a period is what it says, permanently. Reconciling ITC claims against GSTR-2B, not GSTR-2A, is what keeps a business’s claimed credit aligned with what the tax authority will actually recognize for that period.
What this means in practice
A reconciliation workflow built around GSTR-2B needs to pull that statement from the portal each period, match it line by line against purchase records, and flag anything that’s only in one side — an invoice you have that the portal doesn’t show, or a portal entry with no matching purchase record. That’s a matching problem, not a data-entry one, and it’s the same shape of problem regardless of which tool runs it.
For Tally Prime users automating the rest of the AP workflow — invoice capture, 3-way matching, and approvals — see Velanier’s Tally AP automation.