A clean way to ship goods abroad before they're sold

Context

The business needed to position inventory at a partner warehouse in an overseas market *before* a sale existed — title stayed with the company until release, and the actual sale crystallised only when the end customer collected the goods. The company had no permanent establishment in that market. A team had proposed shipping on a manual commercial invoice, which would have mis-stated the transaction as a sale and created tax and revenue-recognition problems.

Challenge

Move physical goods across the border, stay compliant on four fronts at once — GST, customs, foreign-exchange (FEMA) and revenue recognition — and not trigger a "sale" (and the revenue, tax and realisation obligations that come with it) before one actually happened.

What I built

I worked the transaction back to first principles — it's a consignment movement, not a sale — and designed the correct end-to-end framework, verifying the GST treatment against the governing circular rather than from memory:

• At dispatch: a delivery challan (not a tax invoice) for GST; a proforma / consignment invoice for the customs broker to file the shipping bill; a warehousing agreement establishing the partner as keeper, not buyer. No GST charged, no revenue booked.
• In the ERP: a stock movement to an overseas storage location so the inventory stays on the company's books, with the correct movement type — not the manual-invoice route originally proposed.
• At sale (release + customer pickup): the actual tax invoice, zero-rated export, revenue recognised here and only here, consistent with IND AS 115.

I also flagged the non-obvious trap: the deemed-supply clock — if goods are neither sold nor returned within the statutory window, a GST liability is triggered without any sale — and the FEMA realisation mismatch the bank needs told about upfront. Both became active tracking items rather than year-end surprises.

Outcome

A defensible, compliant process the commercial, tax and ERP sides could all sign off on — replacing a well-meant but wrong proposal that would have created a tax and revenue mess. The regulatory risks were surfaced and put under active monitoring before the first shipment, not discovered after.