As you may be aware that the GST Council has decided to introduce electronic-invoice (hereinafter called as E-invoice) on voluntary basis from January 2020. The GST Council has approved introduction of 'E-invoicing' or 'electronic invoicing' in a phased manner for reporting of business to business (B2B) invoices to GST System, starting from 1st January 2020 on voluntary basis.
Since there was no standard for e-invoice existing in the country, standard for the same has
been finalized after consultation with trade/industry bodies as well as ICAI after keeping the
draft in public place. Having a standard is a must to ensure complete inter-operability of
e-invoices across the entire GST eco-system so that e-invoices generated by one software can be
read by any other software, thereby eliminating the need of fresh data entry 'which is a norm
and standard expectation today.
The machine readability and uniform interpretation is the key objective. This is also important
for reporting the details to GST System as part of Return. Apart from the GST System, adoption
of a standard will also ensure that an e-invoice shared by a seller with his buyer or bank or
agent or any other player in the whole business eco-system can be read by machines and obviate
and hence eliminate data entry errors.
The GST Council approved the standard of e-invoice in its 37th meeting held on 20th Sept 2019 and
the same along with schema has been published on GST portal. Standards are generally abstruse
and thus an explanation document is required to present the same in common man's
language.
Also, there are lot of myth or misconception about e-Invoice. The present
document is an attempt to explain the concept of e-invoice, how it operates and basics of
standards. It also contains FAQs which answer the questions raised by people who responded to
the draft e-invoice standard used for public consultation. It is expected that the document will
also be useful for the taxpayers, tax consultants and the software companies to adopt the
designed standard.
For details on the
concept and FAQs on 'E-Invoicing' or 'electronic invoicing', please click
here.
