Stock Register

What Is a Stock Register?

A stock register is a running record of each item a business holds, showing the opening quantity, every receipt and issue, and the balance left after each one. In India, rule 56(2) of the CGST Rules requires most GST-registered businesses to keep one, and it says what each entry must cover.

What GST Requires in a Stock Register

The rule lists the details, and its text is on the CBIC site. For each item the register must show:

• the opening balance
• goods received
• goods supplied
• goods lost, stolen, destroyed or written off
• goods given away as gifts or free samples
• the closing balance, including raw materials, finished goods, scrap and wastage

Businesses under the composition scheme are left out of this sub-rule. Everyone else on regular GST who deals in goods, shops and restaurants alike, needs it.

A few smaller points catch people. Wrong entries may not be erased, and a computer register must log every edit. Keep the register for 72 months from the due date of that year’s annual return, or until a year after any appeal or investigation on those records ends, if later.

How to Keep One Up to Date

Keep one page, or one screen, for each item, and write in the unit you actually count, whether bags, cartons or kilograms, because a register kept in one unit and counted in another is where most arithmetic errors begin. Entries should go in the same day as the bill or the delivery. A week of catching up from memory is how a register drifts away from the shelf, and our guide to restaurant inventory management shows the same habit in a kitchen.

Losses deserve their own line too. A torn bag or a sample handed to a customer is a reduction the law expects you to show, and leaving it out makes your closing stock look higher than it is. Count the shelf monthly and correct the register, noting why.

Stock Register vs Stock Statement

They sound alike but serve different readers.

And a sound statement is built from a sound register, which is why a bank’s stock auditor will usually ask for the register too.

Stock Register Example

A grocery wholesaler in Bareilly keeps this page for 25 kg bags of basmati rice in October 2026.

Note: this is an invented example for illustration only. The wholesaler, bills and quantities are not real.

Sixty-six bags should be on the floor, and a count on 10 October confirms it or shows where to look. Notice that the torn bag and the sample sit in their own column, not hidden inside sales, because rule 56(2) names both.

Our free stock and inventory management template sets up these columns in Excel.

What a Missing Stock Register Costs

Frankly, many small traders discover the register only when someone asks for it. A GST officer who finds goods that are not in your accounts can, under section 35(6) of the CGST Act, work out tax on them as if they had been sold. Under rule 56(6), goods found without valid documents at a place you never declared get the same treatment.

Without a register, theft and billing errors blur together, and that blur is where inventory shrinkage hides. And a year-end that starts from a guess carries the guess into next year’s books, which is why year-end closing starts with a count.

See Each Item’s Stock Balance as It Moves

A paper stock register is only as current as the last person who wrote in it.

For retail businesses, Petpooja Invoice offers centralised inventory management with real-time stock tracking, so the balance column moves as bills and stock entries are made.

For restaurants, Petpooja POSS puts inventory on item-wise auto deduction and gives day-end inventory reports, so each sale is taken off stock without a separate entry.

Pick your five fastest items and compare this week’s register balance with the shelf.

Frequently Asked Questions