Until recently, the E-way bills on the GST portal were used to facilitate the shipment of goods from one place to another. In the 35th GST Council Meeting, an implementation of the e-invoicing system was decided for a specific set of categories. E-invoicing is the introduction of the digital invoice for goods and services provided by the business firm generated at the government GST portal. B2B invoices are authenticated electronically by GSTN for further use on the common GST portal. The biggest advantage of this arrangement is the automation of multi-way reporting through a single-time input of details. E-invoice compliance needs to be executed for all B2B invoices, Debit Note & Credit Note.

Present System for Invoicing

At present, businesses use multiple software to generate invoices. The details are then manually uploaded in the GSTR-1 return, after which, the information is reflected in GSTR-2A only for viewing. Additionally, the transporters also need to generate an e-way bill by importing the invoices again in excel or JSON manually. The new return system will mostly replace the GSTR-1 return. Yet, the process of generating and uploading invoice details shall not be changed. With E-invoicing software, users can achieve a seamless data flow for e-way bill generation.

Present E-invoicing Initiative

The 37th GST Council Meeting approved the GST and Indian tax law compliant e-invoicing format adhering to various global and domestic industry standards. As per the present GSTN’s e-invoicing initiative, any existing invoicing/ accounting software provider must follow the PEPPOL (Pan European Public Procurement Online) standard for invoice generation. This will allow the taxpayers to generate a compliant invoice at the source. PEPPOL is the most commonly used standard across the globe. The system enables varied trading communities and business applications to share information over their supply chains through a standard format. This facilitates a single data entry point into e-commerce for businesses, following which, the data progresses across diverse portals through an IRP.

Also Read: GST Impact on E-commerce

The current GSTN’s e-invoice will comprise of the following:

  1. E-invoice Schema: This will include technical field names, a summary of the individual field, and some sample values with basic interpretation.
  2. Masters: This will include GSTN pre-defined inputs for specific fields like UQC, State Code, invoice type, supply type, etc.
  3. E-invoice Template: This will include the GST compliant template for the reader to better understand the terms in other sheets.

Interaction between ERP System and IRP System

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