E-Invoice Mandate

E-Invoicing or electronic invoicing, is a system designed for B2B invoices and several other documents to be electronically authenticated with the GSTN system.

It is how businesses submit an already generated standard invoice to a common portal and get it registered with the government systems to generate a unique identifier – Invoice Registration Number (IRN). In addition to the IRN, the IRP also provides a QR code to each invoice for easy interoperability of physical invoices.

It all began in the 35th meeting of the GST Council as they took a decision to implement a system of e-invoicing. Initially, it covered only specific categories of persons, mostly larger corporations. Eventually, it expanded to cover small and medium businesses as well. The mandate was scheduled to go live from April 1, 2020, but it was pushed to October 1, 2020, starting in a phased manner.

In the E-Invoicing system, an identification number is issued to every invoice. This is done by the Invoice Registration Portal. The identification number is managed by a government-authorised portal and the registered invoice data is simultaneously shared with the supplier as well as the GST portal at the same time. From the GST portal, this info is auto populated in the buyer’s GSTR 2B.

This real-time information transfer makes manual data-entry redundant when it comes to filing GSTR-1 returns since the information is directly passed to the GST portal by the IRP.

The identification number is called an Invoice Reference Number, or the IRN.