October delight: eWay bill numbers at all-time high of 641 lakh

The Centre on Monday said October saw an all-time high in eWay bill generation, at 641 lakh. Also, e-invoice generation reached 495 lakh in the first month of implementation.

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eWay bill, like a challan, shows goods were moved from one place to another after the requisite tax payment. It is mandatory for the movement of goods worth ₹50,000 or more, and its numbers are seen as a high-frequency economic indicator.

E-invoicing is the electronic reporting of details of specified GST documents on a government-notified portal and obtaining a reference number. It doesn’t mean generation of invoice by a government portal.

The 641 lakh eWay bills generated last month were the highest in a month over the ‘two-and-a-half-year journey of the eWay bill system’, said the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in a statement. Over 495 lakh e-invoices were generated on the NIC portal by 27,400 tax payers last month, it added. Every company with a turnover of ₹500 crore or more is required to generate e-invoices since October 1.

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“The data captured by the Invoice Registration Portal will flow seamlessly to the GSTR1 return of the taxpayer on the GST common portal (gst.gov.in), thus reducing the compliance burden,” NIC said. On day one, 8.4 lakh e e-invoices were generated, which rose to 35 lakh on October 31.

Hassle-free generation

The feedback from taxpayers has been good, and the generation of Invoice Reference Numbers (IRNs) is reportedly hassle-free. NIC said its helpdesk has been assisting taxpayers in fine-tuning their systems to reduce errors.

Currently, there are three modes of IRN generation. The first is the direct linking of the API (application programming interface) of the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system of the taxpayer with the NIC system. The second is the linking of the API interface of the ERP system of the taxpayer through GSP with the NIC system. The third is using an offline tool for bulk uploading of invoices and generating IRNs.

Around 15 per cent of the taxpayers are using the offline tool and 85 per cent are opting for the API route, said NIC.

Lower threshold from Jan 1

The Centre has said the turnover limit for e-invoicing will come down to ₹100 crore from January 1. From April 1 next year, every assessee will be covered.

To address the needs of small taxpayers, who need to prepare five to 10 B2B invoices in a day, NIC is also developing an offline Excel-based IRN preparation and IRN printing tool. These will allow them to enter the invoice details, prepare the file to upload on the NIC IRN portal, download the IRN with a QR code and print the e-invoice with the QR code.