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:
Contents Before Logging into the Portal
The Top Menu shows the following sections:
Contents After Logging into the Portal
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
E-invoice
The E-Invoice menu provides the following features:
A printed e-invoice looks like the image shown below:
MIS Reports
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.
User Management
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:
API Registration
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.
Change Password
This one is self explanatory
Update
This feature lets you auto-populate your business details by pulling the information from the common portal while generating e-invoices.
E-Way Bill
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.