What corporate gifting actually costs after GST

Most gifting budgets are set per head. Someone decides ₹1,500 a person for 200 people, and ₹3,00,000 goes into the plan. The invoice then arrives at a number nobody predicted, and finance asks why.

The gap is almost never the vendor being clever. It is that a gift box is not one product for tax purposes. It is six products in a box, and they do not share a rate.

A hamper is several tax rates in a box

GST is charged against an HSN code, and the code follows the item. Put dry fruit, a ceramic mug, a cotton t-shirt and a power bank in the same box and you have four codes and, usually, more than one rate. The box itself and the branding work carry their own treatment again.

So a per-head figure that looks clean before tax stops being clean the moment the pack is assembled. Two packs at the same pre-tax price can land differently depending on what is inside them, which is why swapping one item for another sometimes moves the total more than you would expect.

• Ask for the tax on the quote, not only the unit price. A per-unit figure with no rate attached is not a budget you can approve.
• Ask for it per line, not as one blended number at the bottom. Blended tax hides which item is moving the total.
• If you are comparing two packs, compare the landed cost. Pre-tax comparisons between different contents are not comparisons.

Input tax credit is usually not yours to claim

The instinct with any B2B purchase is to treat GST as recoverable and budget the pre-tax number. Gifts are the common exception: credit on goods given away as gifts is generally blocked, so the tax is typically a real cost rather than something you net off later.

That single assumption is the one that breaks per-head budgets most often. If your plan quietly assumed the tax came back, the programme is over budget from the day it is approved.

The threshold worth knowing before you scale up

There is a well-known limit on gifts to employees — ₹50,000 per employee in a financial year — beyond which the treatment changes. Most gifting programmes never approach it with a single Diwali box. They approach it by accumulation: a joining kit, a festival hamper, an anniversary gift and a year-end pack, all to the same person, all booked separately by different teams.

Nobody is tracking that total, because no single purchase looked large. It is worth someone owning the annual per-employee figure before the fourth kit of the year is ordered.

What to ask a vendor before you approve

• HSN code and rate against every line, including branding and the packaging.
• The landed per-head cost, tax included, so it can be compared to the per-head budget directly.
• Whether shipping is quoted separately and how it is taxed.
• Whether the invoice carries your entity's GSTIN correctly — a wrong GSTIN is a reissue, and reissues take longer than the delivery did.

A vendor who cannot answer those four before an order is placed will not answer them faster after it. On SwagWorks the full total — product, branding, GST and shipping — is visible before checkout rather than assembled afterwards, which is the point: the number you approve should be the number you book.