GST for a dental practice: what to ask your CA

The general position

Healthcare services provided by a clinical establishment or an authorised medical practitioner are exempt from GST. For a practice doing routine diagnosis and treatment, that covers the large majority of what you bill.

Exempt is not the same as zero-rated, and it has a consequence people miss: if your supplies are exempt, you generally cannot claim input tax credit on what you buy. The GST on your chair, your consumables and your lab bills is a cost, not a credit.

Where dental practices sit near the edge

Four areas come up repeatedly, and all four deserve a specific answer from your accountant rather than a general assumption:

• Cosmetic versus therapeutic. Treatment for a medical condition sits differently from a purely aesthetic procedure. Whitening and smile-design work is the usual grey zone in dentistry.
• Goods sold alongside treatment. Selling a brush, a mouthwash or a retainer case is a supply of goods, and goods are not covered by the healthcare exemption.
• Lab work and outsourced prosthetics. Where the lab is a separate entity billing you, ask how that flows through your position.
• Rent from a chair or room let to a visiting practitioner. That is not a healthcare service at all.

Registration is a separate question

Whether you must register depends on aggregate turnover, and aggregate turnover includes exempt supplies. A practice can therefore cross the threshold on turnover while having very little taxable supply — the conclusion is not automatic either way, which is precisely why it is a CA question.

What your invoicing needs to do regardless

Irrespective of your GST position, an invoice should be numbered in an unbroken sequence per practice, dated, itemised, and reproducible months later exactly as it was issued. Practices get into difficulty when invoices are edited after the fact rather than credited and reissued.

1. Sequential numbering you do not control by hand.
2. Line items that name the treatment, not just "dental work".
3. A record of what was paid, when, and by what mode.
4. A void-and-reissue path rather than silent edits.

Where GullyMed is today, plainly

Invoices are numbered per practice in sequence, itemised, delivered as PDF and by email, with part-payments and instalments modelled properly. Full GST invoicing — tax breakup on the invoice, HSN/SAC handling, filing-ready exports — is on the roadmap and not shipped. If you need GST invoices today, say so before you sign up rather than after.

We would rather lose a signup than have you discover that in week two.