Corporate Transport Terms

Contract structure

A company account with Om Travels rests on three things: the published rate card, a signed duty slip behind every trip, and one GST invoice raised against the account each month. What an account actually changes for your team, how a car is ordered, the driver settled the evening before, one bill instead of many, is set out at /corporate. This page is the legal terms behind that arrangement.

Four things, read together, make up the whole of the agreement between us: this page, our Booking Terms & Conditions, the published rate card at /tariff, and the account itself, opened once your enquiry is confirmed in writing and covering every trip your team books afterwards rather than being re-agreed trip by trip. Where this page and our Booking Terms & Conditions differ on a point that applies to both, this page governs for anything booked on a company account, because it is the version written for that relationship. Where this page is silent on something, our other published legal pages, linked at /legal and from the foot of this one, fill the gap in the ordinary way.

An account is not a fresh contract signed for every booking. Once your enquiry is confirmed and your account is opened, whoever in your organisation books a trip, an assistant, a travel desk, an employee quoting the account reference, is booking under these terms without renegotiating them each time. That is deliberate: an account exists so your team can book the way it books any other vendor, on standard terms it does not have to read afresh every time somebody needs a car.

Commercial terms

Every trip taken on your account is priced off the same published rate card as a booking made directly through this website. There is no separate negotiated rate sitting behind it, so a figure your team quotes in a tender or an RFP response is the figure that is actually billed, whichever employee books the trip and on however short a notice.

The rate card does not move for the length of an individual quotation: our Pricing & Taxes policy at /legal/pricing-and-taxes sets out the closed list of reasons a quoted price can change once you hold it, a fuel-price notification, a change in toll or a government levy, or a change you ask for to the itinerary, dates, class or passenger count, and nothing else. That same discipline extends to the account as a whole. If the underlying rate card is ever revised, the change applies to bookings made after your account contact has been told of it in writing; a trip already confirmed at the old figure is honoured at the old figure. Your finance team is never billed a rate it was not shown in advance.

Billing runs on a monthly cycle. Every trip taken in a calendar month is gathered onto one GST invoice, with the signed duty slip for each trip behind the corresponding line, rather than a bill each time somebody travels. Each line carries the date, the route or duty, the vehicle class and the fare, so it can be checked against the duty slip and against your own travel record without having to ask us for a breakdown.

Where your organisation books through more than one department or cost centre, give us the reference, a purchase order number, a cost-centre code, an employee or department identifier, at the time of booking, and it is carried through onto the corresponding invoice line. We do not invent a coding structure of our own for you to adopt; we record whatever reference your own booking gives us, so your accounts team can match our invoice against its own system rather than reconciling it by hand.

The methods by which an account is settled, and the due date shown on each invoice, are stated at /payment-terms and on the invoice itself. Where your organisation needs a specific credit period against its own payment terms, that is agreed in writing with your account contact before it is relied upon; nothing on this page assumes a credit period that has not actually been agreed.

GST

GST on chauffeur-driven vehicle hire is charged at 5%, without input tax credit. How this figure is worked out and shown on your invoice is set out in full at /legal/gst-and-invoicing.

This is one rate, applied the same way to every booking on the account: there is no lower rate offered with input tax credit attached, and no negotiated rate that departs from it for a larger account. Two SAC codes cover what we invoice, 9964 for a point-to-point or fixed-itinerary transfer and 9966 where the vehicle and driver are hired for a period rather than a specific transfer, and which one applies to a given trip is stated on the quotation and carried through to the invoice.

Because the rate carries no input tax credit, chauffeur-driven hire from us is a cost your finance team cannot net off against its own GST liability, whatever your organisation's structure. Build that into how you compare our published fare against a quotation from anyone assuming a credit-bearing rate; the two are not the same figure once the credit is accounted for.

The reverse charge position

This is the section a procurement team actually reads before signing, so it is stated plainly rather than folded into the GST section above.

Reverse charge is a mechanism inside GST where the liability to pay the tax moves from the person supplying the service to the person receiving it, rather than sitting with the supplier as it does in the ordinary course. Government uses it selectively, generally where the supplier side of a sector is made up of a very large number of small, often individual, operators and collecting the tax from the far larger and better-organised recipient side is administratively simpler and more reliable. Renting of motor vehicles is exactly that sector, and entry 15 of Notification 13/2017-Central Tax (Rate) is the specific notification that puts it there: where a motor vehicle is rented with an operator by a supplier other than a body corporate, to a recipient that is a body corporate, the recipient pays the GST directly rather than the supplier charging it forward.

Om Taxi Service is a proprietorship, not a body corporate. Accordingly, GST on renting of motor vehicles supplied to your body corporate is payable by you under reverse charge, under entry 15 of Notification 13/2017-Central Tax (Rate). This position is stated on every invoice and will not change without written notice.

Whether this applies to your organisation turns on one question: is your organisation itself a body corporate. A private limited company, a public limited company and a limited liability partnership are all body corporates, because the LLP Act, 2008 defines an LLP as one; a partnership firm, a proprietorship, an individual, a Hindu Undivided Family, a trust and most societies are not. If your organisation books us and is not a body corporate, reverse charge does not apply to that booking at all, and we charge GST forward on the invoice in the ordinary way, at the same 5%, without input tax credit. If you are genuinely unsure which category your organisation falls into, your own company secretary or your tax adviser will settle it in a sentence; it is not a question this page can answer for you.

In practice, where reverse charge applies: we do not add a GST amount to your invoice. The invoice states the taxable value, states the rate, and states plainly that the GST on that value is payable by you under reverse charge rather than to us. Your business then self-assesses that GST and deposits it directly with the government through its own GST return, on its own filing cycle, entirely independent of when you actually pay our invoice.

Whether you may then claim input tax credit on the GST you have self-assessed and paid is a genuine question, and it is not automatically yes. Because renting a motor vehicle with an operator at 5%, without input tax credit is, by design, a rate offered without input tax credit, that restriction is generally understood to carry through to the amount you pay yourself under reverse charge on this supply, not only to an amount we would have charged forward. Separately, section 17(5) of the CGST Act blocks input tax credit on renting a motor vehicle for most recipients outright, with narrow exceptions where the vehicle is used to make a further outward taxable supply of the same kind, to transport passengers as your own business, or where the government notifies it as obligatory for you to provide under some other law. Whether either exception applies to your organisation, and whether credit is available on the reverse-charge amount at all, is a determination for your own tax adviser working from your own facts; we state the position honestly rather than assume an answer that suits either of us.

TDS under Section 194C

A payment you make to us under a corporate account is a payment under a contract for carrying passengers, and Section 194C of the Income-tax Act, 1961 applies to it in the ordinary way. Deduct tax at source at the rate the section prescribes for a contractor payment, and issue the certificate as you would for any other transport contractor.

The rate itself depends on what we are, not on what you are: section 194C sets one rate where the payment is made to an individual or a Hindu Undivided Family, and a higher rate for every other kind of payee, a company, a firm, a trust. Om Taxi Service is a proprietorship, which for section 194C purposes is deducted at the individual rate rather than the higher one. Our PAN, which your accounts team needs on file to deduct at the correct rate and to file its own TDS return, is given on request, the same as our GST registration certificate.

Section 194C carries a small-payment exemption: deduction is not required where a single payment does not exceed ₹30,000 and the total paid to the same payee across the financial year does not exceed ₹1,00,000. On a company account billed every month, the annual total to us crosses that aggregate figure quickly for any account in regular use, and once it does, TDS applies for the rest of the financial year in the ordinary way. We mention this because it is the exemption a smaller or newer account sometimes assumes still applies once the relationship has been running a few months, and it does not.

The relief in Section 194C(6), which excuses a payer from deducting tax on a payment to a transporter who owns ten or fewer goods carriages and has furnished a PAN, is written for the business of plying, hiring or leasing goods carriages. It does not extend to a contract for carrying passengers, so it does not apply to a payment made to us, and TDS should be deducted in the ordinary way.

Getting this wrong has a cost on your own side rather than ours. Where tax deductible under section 194C is not deducted, or is deducted but not deposited with the government, section 40(a)(ia) of the Income-tax Act disallows thirty per cent of the payment as a deduction in computing your business income for that year, restored only once the tax is actually deducted and paid. Where PAN is not furnished, section 206AA requires deduction at a materially higher rate than the ordinary one. Neither of these is a figure we control; both are reasons to treat the deduction as routine rather than as something to skip on a smaller invoice.

MSME and Udyam registration

Whether we hold Udyam registration as a micro or small enterprise is confirmed on request. Ask your account contact before you set a payment term that assumes an answer either way.

It matters for your own compliance whatever the answer turns out to be, so it is stated here as general information. Where a supplier does hold Udyam registration, Section 15 of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, 2006 requires a buyer to pay within the period agreed in writing, and never more than 45 days from the date the service is accepted. Section 43B(h) of the Income-tax Act, 1961 then disallows the deduction of that expense in the year it fell due unless it was actually paid inside that window.

The 45-day figure in Section 15 is a ceiling, not a default your own purchase order terms can extend past by agreement. Even where your organisation's standard vendor terms specify sixty or ninety days, and even where both sides sign a contract saying so, the Act caps the agreed period at 45 days from the date the service is accepted, or, where nothing is agreed in writing, considerably sooner. A written agreement between us cannot lawfully move that ceiling further out; it can only bring it in.

Miss that date and Section 16 of the same Act does not leave the consequence to the contract either: the buyer becomes liable for compound interest, with monthly rests, at three times the bank rate notified by the Reserve Bank of India, running from the date payment fell due. That rate is set deliberately high, and it is set by statute rather than by us, precisely so a buyer cannot treat a delayed payment to a small supplier as cheap financing.

Section 43B(h) is sharper than most of the other clauses in that section, and this is the part worth your finance team actually reading rather than filing. For most expenses under section 43B, paying late still lets you claim the deduction in the year it was incurred, so long as you pay before you file that year's return. Clause (h) carries no such saving. Pay a Udyam-registered micro or small supplier even one day beyond the 45-day ceiling, and the expense is disallowed for that financial year outright, whatever else your return shows and however soon afterwards you do pay it. It becomes deductible only in the year you actually make the payment, which for a delayed invoice can mean the deduction shifts into your next financial year entirely, increasing the taxable profit you report for the year the trip actually took place.

Two things follow for your own payment process, whichever way the answer to the question at the top of this section turns out to lie. If we do hold Udyam registration, ask your account contact for written confirmation of it and hold that confirmation in your own vendor file; it is what your auditor will look for when checking whether the 45-day rule applied to a given invoice. If we do not, this section does not bind your payment terms at all, and the ordinary commercial terms at /payment-terms and elsewhere on this page govern instead. Either way, the answer is worth establishing before you set a standard payment term against this account rather than after an invoice has already gone unpaid for two months.

Employee safety commitments

A driver put on your account carries a licence with the right endorsement and a badge, and his police verification is on file before he is given the duty, whether he is employed by us directly or drawn from an operator we work with.

Where the vehicle is fitted with live tracking, that tracking is available for the duty. Anything involving your employee that needs reporting, a delay, a deviation from the route, an incident, a complaint about the driver, is reported to a contact your HR names, as soon as we know of it. The line that takes that report is answered at any hour, so a genuine incident does not wait on office hours to reach us.

These commitments sit alongside your own responsibility as an employer, not in place of it. We are answerable for the vehicle, the driver and the conduct of the trip, and our Limitation of Liability policy at /legal/limitation-of-liability sets out exactly where that responsibility begins and ends. Whatever duty of care your own organisation owes its employees when they travel for work, under its own policies or under a law like the Employees’ Compensation Act, 1923, continues to sit with you; booking a vetted driver from us does not transfer that duty to us, and we do not represent that it does.

Fuller detail on our safety standards, and on carrying a woman travelling alone or at night, is at /safety-and-standards and /legal/women-traveller-safety.

The POSH interface

A driver on your account is at work, in our workplace, for the length of the duty, and under the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act, 2013 the definition of 'workplace' reaches into this relationship: section 2(o) extends the term to transportation provided by an employer for a work journey, not only to an office. A trip we run for your employee can therefore sit within the reach of your own organisation's POSH obligations as well as ours, depending on the facts, and it is worth your own Internal Committee knowing that before it ever needs to.

Our own position is straightforward. Every driver and every member of our staff is bound by our POSH Policy, published in full at /legal/posh-policy, which extends to the vehicle as an extension of the workplace and gives a complaint route to your employee directly, not only to our own people.

Where a complaint runs the other way, either your employee raising one against our driver, or our driver raising one against your employee, we expect the same thing from each other: full cooperation with whichever Internal Committee is actually seized of the matter, an honest account of what our own records show, live tracking data, the duty slip, the driver's own statement, where relevant, and no attempt by either side to resolve an inquiry informally on the other's behalf. Where your own Internal Committee needs a fact only we hold to complete an inquiry involving one of our drivers, ask through your account contact and we will provide it.

Data processing

Booking your employees onto a duty means we hold their names, phone numbers, pick-up points and trip history. How we handle personal data generally is set out in our Privacy Policy at /privacy-policy; the position specific to a corporate account is stated below.

In respect of employee roster, contact and trip data supplied by the Client, Om Travels acts as a Data Processor and the Client is the Data Fiduciary. We process only on the Client's documented instructions, maintain appropriate security measures, and delete or return all Client data on termination in accordance with the agreed schedule.

'Documented instructions' is not a separate document your legal team has to draft before we can process a booking. In the ordinary run of an account, your instruction is the booking itself: the roster, the pick-up point, the passenger name and number your team gives us each time a duty is booked, read together with this page and our Privacy Policy, is the documented instruction that authorises us to use that data to run the trip, share the minimum of it with the driver actually assigned, and record it against the duty slip and the invoice. We do not use employee roster data for anything outside that: not for our own marketing, not shared with another client, not sold or passed on beyond what running the trip and keeping the statutory record actually requires. Anything genuinely outside that ordinary use, a request to hold data for a purpose beyond running trips, for instance, needs a further instruction from you in writing before we act on it.

'The agreed schedule' works two ways rather than one. Some of what we hold has to be kept regardless of what either of us would prefer, because tax and GST law require us to retain the invoice and the duty slip behind it for a statutory period, and that record is not deleted early just because the account has closed. Employee roster and contact data that sits outside that statutory record, a phone number or a pick-up address kept for convenience beyond the trips it was collected for, is a different case, and there is nothing statutory holding it: on request, and in any case on termination, we delete or return it. Where your organisation wants a shorter routine retention period than our statutory minimum, or wants data returned to you rather than deleted, agree it in writing with your account contact, and that agreement becomes the schedule this clause refers to.

Confidentiality

The rate you are quoted, any arrangement specific to your account, and the terms of your contract with us are confidential. We do not disclose them to another client or to a third party, other than to a professional adviser bound by their own duty of confidence, or where the law requires it.

This is a different promise from the one in the Data Processing section above, and it is worth keeping the two apart. That section is about your employees' personal data; this one is about the commercial terms of your account itself, the rate, any account-specific arrangement, the figures in your contract. Both are protected, and neither substitutes for the other.

We ask the same of you in return. The rate you are quoted is exactly the rate quoted to every other account of the same size and pattern of use, and that only holds as a promise if it is not passed around as a competitive benchmark for somebody else’s negotiation. Keep your rate and the specific terms of your account to your own organisation and your own professional advisers, the same boundary we hold to on our side.

This obligation survives the account closing. Ending a company account under the Termination section below does not release either side from confidentiality over what was shared while it was open.

Insurance

Our fleet carries the insurance the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 requires, together with our own comprehensive and passenger cover. A certificate, for a specific vehicle or for the fleet generally, is furnished on request, for your own file or your auditor's.

Three separate covers sit behind a vehicle we put on your account, and they answer different claims: compulsory third-party cover for a claim from outside the vehicle, comprehensive cover for damage to the vehicle itself, and passenger cover for injury to the people actually travelling in it, your employees among them. How the three interact, and what a genuine motor accident claim looks like under each, is set out in full at /legal/limitation-of-liability; this page states that the cover exists and how to get evidence of it, that page states what each one actually does.

Passenger cover on our vehicle is not the same thing as, and does not replace, any obligation your own organisation carries toward an employee injured while travelling for work, under the Employees’ Compensation Act, 1923 or otherwise. The two sit alongside each other rather than one standing in for the other, the same boundary set out in the Employee Safety Commitments section above.

Audit rights

On reasonable written notice, you may inspect the duty slips, invoices and driver documents behind a booking made on your account. We ask for notice so the right file and the right person are ready on the day, not to slow the request down.

Send the request to your account contact, in writing, naming the trips or the period you want to look at. What is in scope is everything behind your own account: the duty slips signed on your trips, the invoices raised against it, and the licence, badge and verification record of a driver who has actually been on your booking. This right exists for exactly the reason most corporate vendor-audit and empanelment processes ask for it, so your own compliance or internal audit team has documentary evidence behind our invoice rather than having to take our word for it.

What is not in scope is our own internal pricing and costing, another client’s account, and the personnel file of a driver beyond the parts relevant to your own bookings. An audit right over your account is not a general right to see how the business is run, and we do not read it that way; nothing here extends to internal material that has nothing to do with your own trips.

Whatever your team sees in the course of an audit is covered by the same confidentiality this page already sets out above; an audit finding about your own account is naturally yours to use, and it is not to be shared as a benchmark against another client’s terms.

Business continuity

We do not publish an uptime figure or a fixed replacement time for a vehicle that fails on your account. What we do set out is how the account actually keeps running when something on a single trip does not go to plan.

Part of our fleet is directly ours and part is drawn from vehicle partners we have worked with for years, and this matters for continuity specifically: where a vehicle we would ordinarily send is off the road, unavailable, or already committed elsewhere, the class you booked can be filled from either side of that fleet rather than from one narrow pool. What is confirmed to your account is the vehicle class and the standard it is held to, never one specific registration number, which is also why nothing on this site publishes a registration number, a fitness date or a specific model against a booking.

The vehicle and the driver for a duty are confirmed to whoever booked it the evening before, which functions as a continuity checkpoint in its own right: a problem on the allocated vehicle or driver surfaces the evening before the trip rather than at the pick-up point, while there is still time to act on it.

Where something genuinely goes wrong once a duty is under way, a mechanical failure, a driver unable to continue, our Emergency Protocol at /legal/emergency-protocol sets out exactly what happens next and who is contacted. A delay or disruption caused by something outside either side’s control, weather, a road closure, a strike, a genuine force majeure event, is handled under our Force Majeure Policy at /legal/force-majeure rather than treated as a failure on our part, and the interaction between that policy and our liability to you is set out in full at /legal/limitation-of-liability.

The office itself is reachable at any hour, and your account contact and our Grievance Officer, at /grievance-redressal, are both a route to a person rather than to a queue. Account-level matters, rather than a single trip, reach us directly at sachin@om-travels.in. An account does not depend on one individual on either side being available at a particular moment.

Termination and transition

Either of us may end a corporate account on written notice to the other. A trip already run is invoiced and paid for in the ordinary way regardless of when notice is given.

A trip already confirmed for a date before the account actually closes is honoured on the terms it was booked on, the same rate, the same class, whether that date falls before or after notice was given. Ending the account stops new bookings from being made against it; it does not unwind a booking that already exists.

Some obligations on this page are not switched off by ending the account. Confidentiality, as set out above, continues to apply to what either side learned while the account was open. Any payment already due for a trip that has run is still owed, on the same terms it would have been owed on had the account stayed open. And a dispute arising out of anything that happened while the account was live is still resolved the way the Dispute Resolution section below sets out, whether or not the account itself still exists by the time the dispute is raised.

Where you ask us to, we hand over the trip history and duty slip record for the account before it closes, so your own record stays complete. This is the same handover the Data Processing section above refers to as the agreed schedule, and it is worth agreeing its shape, a single export, a running handover, before notice is actually given rather than after.

Dispute resolution

A dispute under a corporate agreement is not the same kind of dispute as one with an individual customer travelling with us: both sides here have taken advice and agreed terms in writing, and arbitration is a reasonable and standard way to resolve a disagreement between us. Nothing on this page affects a right you have as an individual consumer elsewhere on this site; that position is set out at /terms and stays open to consumers only.

The reason arbitration sits here and nowhere else on this site is not a preference for one forum over another. Under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, a clause forcing an individual consumer into arbitration and away from a Consumer Commission is routinely treated as an unfair contract term under section 2(46) and is not enforced against her; our own Terms of Use say so in plain terms, and we do not attempt an arbitration clause against a consumer anywhere on this site. A corporate account is a different relationship in the way that actually matters here: both sides are commercial parties, both have had the opportunity to take their own legal advice before the account was opened, and both have agreed this clause in writing rather than met it buried in small print on a consumer checkout screen. That is exactly the setting Indian courts and the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 itself expect arbitration to be used in, and it is why the clause is confined to this page rather than appearing anywhere a consumer could be bound by it.

It also suits the kind of dispute a running account actually produces. A disagreement over an invoice, a rate, a service standard or the interpretation of this contract is commercial in nature and is better resolved by an arbitrator familiar with a commercial contract than run through the general court list, and it is resolved privately, which sits naturally alongside the confidentiality this page already commits both of us to.

A dispute arising out of or in connection with a corporate agreement, including a question about its existence, validity or termination, is referred to and finally resolved by arbitration seated in Panipat, Haryana, conducted in English under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, before a sole arbitrator appointed by mutual agreement. The courts at Panipat, Haryana have exclusive jurisdiction over any matter the arbitration does not cover.

‘Seated’ in Panipat fixes which court supervises the arbitration itself, hearings, interim relief before the tribunal is constituted, and, where it is ever needed, a challenge to the final award; it does not mean a hearing has to physically take place in Panipat, which the parties may agree to hold elsewhere for convenience while the seat stays fixed. Where we cannot agree on who the sole arbitrator should be, either side may apply to the appropriate court under section 11 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 to have one appointed, so the process does not stall on a disagreement about the arbitrator alone. The award, once made, is enforceable as a decree of the court in the ordinary way under section 36 of the Act, and either side’s ordinary right to apply to set it aside under section 34, on the narrow grounds that section allows, is not affected by anything on this page.

None of this touches a booking you make with us as an individual, on this website, outside a company account. That remains governed by our Booking Terms & Conditions and our Terms of Use at /terms, with every consumer right the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 gives you intact.