To facilitate taxpayers in their GST Compliance efforts, the GST Network (GSTN) has set up dedicated portals to manage various compliance tasks, such as e-way bill management on the e-way bill portal, and likewise, the e-invoice portal for managing e-invoices. The E-Invoicing Portal continually sees surges in the user base numbers, owing to e-invoicing becoming applicable to more businesses with each new phase of implementation. Currently, 5 phases of e-invoicing have been implemented, and it is currently applicable to businesses that have generated a turnover of more than ₹10 crores in any financial year since GST was implemented in FY 2017-18.
In this article, we will provide a complete overview of the E-Invoice Portal, India’s first invoice registration portal.
Businesses to whom e-invoicing is applicable need to get their B2B invoices authenticated. The E-Invoice Portal, also known as the Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) is the website where such businesses need to login and upload the invoices of their B2B transactions. These invoices are then digitally authenticated by the IRP, and an e-invoice is generated automatically for these invoices.
The e-invoice portal provides the following facilities for taxpayers:
This section is divided into two parts:
The Top Menu shows the following sections:
Below is a screenshot of the main screen that logged in users will see on the portal:
As you can see in the screenshot above, there are seven main categories of features available to logged in users:
We will discuss each of these features in detail
The E-Invoice menu provides the following features:
A printed e-invoice looks like the image shown below:
You can use this option to generate MIS reports showing the list of invoices uploaded based on selected parameters and dates. You can also export this list in Excel format by clicking the ‘Export to Excel’ tab.
Large businesses may not depend only on a single person to create the e-invoices. For better efficiency, they can create and manage sub-users on the E-Invoice Portal, as shown below:
The main user can set permissions levels for the sub-users, as follows:
This feature allows taxpayers to integrate their ERP with the E-Invoice Portal, either directly or through a GST Suvidha Provider (GSP). To do this, go to ‘API Registration’ > IP Whitelisting and register your IP address on the portal.
To register your GSTIN for the API interface and set login credentials, go to the ‘User Credentials’ option and select ‘Create API User’. If a sister concern of your GSTIN has already registered for the API interface, their details will be displayed. To set login credentials for your concern, enter the client ID and client secret.
This one is self explanatory
This feature lets you auto-populate your business details by pulling the information from the common portal while generating e-invoices.
Use this feature to auto-populate Part A of E-Way Bills while generating them. Only Part B remains to be filled once this is done.
You will need to register again on the e-invoice portal. However, if you have already registered on the e-way bill portal, then the same credentials can be used to login to the e-invoice portal too.
If your business falls under the applicability of e-invoicing, then yes, it is compulsory to generate e-invoices for all your B2B transactions.
No, you cannot partially cancel an e-invoice. If, for any reason, you need to cancel an e-invoice, you need to completely cancel the IRN associated with that e-invoice.
You can have a maximum of 10 sub-users for a single place of business. If you have multiple places of business, you can have up to 10 sub-users for each.
No, it is not necessary to have sub-users. It is purely dependent on the needs of your business.
For smooth performance, currently the portal does not provide the facility to download reports for multiple days. You will need to download the reports for one day at a time.
Yes, you can make amendments to an e-invoice, but not on the e-invoice portal itself. You will need to go to the GST Portal to make the required amendments.