Tax rules move. A rate changes, a due date shifts, a form gains a column — and the way most small businesses find out is a forwarded WhatsApp message with no source, six weeks late, or their CA mentioning it on a call in October.
The Compliance Newsroom is Finocket's answer to that: every change written in plain language, each one carrying the official document it was read out of, and each one approved by a named person before it appears anywhere.
Three places you will see it
- The public newsroom — open to anyone, no account needed. Share the link with your accountant or your suppliers.
- GST → Newsroom inside your workspace, which also shows which changes touch your books.
- A What changed for you card on your dashboard, which appears only when there is something you have not seen. You can mark an item seen or dismiss it, and the card goes quiet again.
The dashboard card being absent means there is nothing new. If the check itself failed, it says so in one line instead of hiding — “we could not check” and “nothing changed” are the two sentences this whole feature exists to keep apart.
Announced is not the same as notified
This is the distinction that costs businesses real money, and it is the one the newsroom is most careful about.
The GST Council meets and issues a press release. Newspapers report it as though it were law that afternoon. It is not. Nothing changes for your invoices until the change is notified — published as a notification, with a date it takes effect from.
So an item drawn from a council press release carries a banner saying announced, not yet notified, and its dates are described as announced rather than in force. When the notification follows, that is a separate item with the notification behind it.
The practical instruction is short: read the announcements, act on the notifications. Changing what you charge on the strength of a press release means invoicing at a rate nobody has notified.
“What touches your books”, and what it looks at
A published change is matched against your workspace so you are not asked to read everything. Finocket looks at four things: the HSN and SAC codes your items are classified under, the state you are registered in, the turnover band you have stated, and the line of business on your profile. When one of those matches, the item is brought to you with a plain reason — which codes, or which state.
Worth being explicit about what it does not look at: nothing you typed. Not an invoice line description, not a client name, not a note. The matching reads codes and amounts and nothing else, and it is built so that it could not read the rest even if someone later wanted it to.
Five languages, and why an item may still be in English
The newsroom is available in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. An item may still show in English with a line saying it has not been translated yet, and that is deliberate rather than a gap in the schedule.
A translation of a compliance item is a statement about tax law in another language. “Notified” and “announced” are one word apart in every Indian language, and “the rate rises to” and “the rate rises by” are one small word apart in Hindi. A reader who acts on the wrong one invoices wrongly.
So a translation is only shown once a named person has reviewed it — and it may not be the same person who drafted it. Anything that has not been through that is withheld, and you get the approved English instead, clearly labelled. An untranslated item is not a broken item.
The newsroom is empty right now, and that is honest
As things stand, nothing has been published. The screens exist, they work, and they render their own empty state — because the first item will only appear once a reviewer has approved one.
An empty newsroom and an unreachable one look different on purpose. If the feed cannot be loaded at all, you are told that rather than shown a page that looks calmly like there is no news.
Reading it with a program
There is a public feed at /newsroom/feed returning the published items as JSON — headline, summary, category, severity, the documents cited, the effective date, and when it was published. It is the same reader the page uses, so the two can never tell you different things.
One behaviour to build against: if the read failed, the feed answers with an error status and refuses to be cached. It will never hand you an empty list that means “something broke”.
What the newsroom will not do
It will not tell you what to do about a change, and it does not adjust your invoices, rates or returns by itself. It reports what was published, with the document attached, so that the conversation with your CA starts from a source rather than from a rumour.
Related: Where a tax figure comes from, Reports & GST filings, Notifications.