Payments and school orders

How a school order works

Five steps, in this order. Nobody is asked to pay anything before they have a written quotation naming the price and the terms.

1. You enquire

   Through the For Schools form or by telephone. Tell us the board, the class and roughly how many copies. A sample copy goes out to any school that asks, at no charge and with no obligation.

2. We quote

   The office sends a quotation or a proforma invoice naming the price per copy at your quantity, the taxes, the delivery date, the payment terms and how long the quotation stands. Nothing is agreed before you have that in writing, and a quotation is an invitation to order — not an offer we can hold you to.

3. You raise a purchase order

   Against the quotation, in your school’s own format. This is the point at which the order exists; until then the quotation binds nobody. We will confirm acceptance of it in writing, and that confirmation is what forms the contract under s. 10 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872.

4. We invoice and dispatch

   A GST invoice is raised under GSTIN 32AAMCP6989J1ZN, in the form s. 31 of the CGST Act, 2017 requires, and the books are dispatched from Ernakulam. The shipping policy covers timing and charges.

5. You pay as the quotation says

   By the terms and to the account stated on the proforma invoice — not to any account given in an email you were not expecting. Read the fraud note below before you transfer anything.

Payment terms, and the clock

The credit period, if any, is the one stated on your quotation and repeated on the invoice. Where none is stated, payment is due against the invoice before dispatch. We do not apply a standard term across every school, because a school’s own payment cycle is a real constraint and is usually worth talking about before the order rather than after it.

Where Playway Books Pvt Ltd is a registered micro or small enterprise for an order, ss. 15 and 16 of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, 2006 apply: payment falls due within the agreed period and in any case within forty-five days of acceptance of the goods, with compound interest at three times the notified RBI bank rate on a delay. Any Udyam registration number applicable to an order is stated on that order’s invoice; the statutory consequence is the Act’s, not a penalty we invented.

A cheque given in payment and returned unpaid engages s. 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881. In practice we ring you first — a bounced cheque is far more often a bank error or a signature mismatch than anything else.

Tax

A direct order is invoiced by Playway Books Pvt Ltd under the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 and the Kerala State GST Act, 2017. The invoice carries our GSTIN, 32AAMCP6989J1ZN, and shows the classification, the rate and the tax treatment applied to that order — a school needs all of it for its own records, and the quotation states them before you commit to anything.

We do not print a rate on this page, deliberately. Printed books and consumable workbooks are not classified alike, classification depends on the item and on the law as it stands on the date of supply, and a rate published on a website is a rate someone will rely on after it has changed. Ask for a quotation and the current treatment is on it, in writing, before you raise a purchase order.

Give us your GSTIN with the purchase order if you have one, so the invoice is raised correctly and your input tax credit is not lost to a typing error. A credit note against a return is raised under s. 34 of the CGST Act, 2017.

Tax deducted or collected at source. Depending on turnover, s. 194Q of the Income-tax Act, 1961 may require the buyer to deduct tax on the purchase, or s. 206C(1H) may require the seller to collect it — and both cannot apply to the same transaction. Which one applies to your order is stated on the quotation, so that your accounts office is not left working it out after the invoice has been booked. Where you deduct, please send the certificate; where we collect, it appears as a line on the invoice.

Currency, and orders from outside India

Direct orders are quoted and invoiced in Indian rupees and dispatched from Ernakulam. For an order from outside India, ring or write first. It can usually be arranged, but not on the same terms: the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 and the Foreign Trade (Development and Regulation) Act, 1992 govern the payment and the export, the shipping cost is materially different, and we would far rather say so before you raise a purchase order than after.

What we do not do

• · We do not store any card, UPI or bank credential of any buyer. This site could not take one if it tried.
• · We do not take payment by cryptocurrency, gift card, or any voucher-based instrument. If somebody claiming to be us asks you to, it is not us.
• · We do not use a payment aggregator, a payment link service, or a QR code sent by message. An invoice from us names a bank account on a document, not a link in a chat.
• · We do not offer credit outside a written quotation, and we do not ask for a deposit by telephone.

Before you transfer money, ring us

Our bank details are not published on this website, and they never will be. They are stated on the proforma invoice the office sends you, addressed to a named person at your school.

This is the ordinary defence against a common fraud: someone intercepts or imitates a supplier’s email and sends the buyer a message changing the account number, and the money goes to them. So — if you receive anything that appears to change our bank details, do not act on it. Ring +91 99471 23678 and read the account number back to whoever answers before you transfer anything. It takes a minute and it has saved schools a great deal of money.

Four things that are always true of a real communication from us, and worth checking against:

• · Our bank details never change mid-order. If an email says they have, it is not from us.
• · We never ask for payment to a personal account, or to an account in a name other than Playway Books Pvt Ltd.
• · We never create urgency about a transfer. Nobody at this office will tell you a price expires this afternoon.
• · Our email addresses end in the domain on this website. Check the spelling of the domain character by character; a lookalike domain is the whole of how this fraud works.

Impersonating us in this way is an offence under ss. 66C and 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and s. 318 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. If you have been targeted, report it on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal or ring 1930 immediately — speed is what makes a transfer recoverable — and tell us as well, so we can warn other schools.

The same applies in reverse: if you have paid and are not sure it reached us, ring rather than wait. The office can confirm a receipt against an invoice number the same day.