As per notification no. 88/2020-Central Tax dt.10th November’20, E-invoicing has been made applicable w.e.f. 01st January 2021 to entities having turnover exceeding Rs. 100 crore in any of the preceding 3 financial years. The financial years for which this limit has to be checked are FY 2017-18, 2018-19 & 2019-20.
Such taxpayers will continue to generate their invoices as they are now in their own accounting/billing software, however the same after generation will now have to be reported to “Invoice Registration Portal”. The portal to generate e-invoice is https://einvoice1.gst.gov.in/
Once the supplier uploads the JSON of the invoice into the IRP (Invoice Reference Portal), The IRP will generate the hash. The hash generated by IRP will become the IRN (Invoice Reference Number) of the e-invoice. This shall be unique to each invoice and hence be the unique identity for each invoice for the entire financial year in the entire GST system for a taxpayer.
E-Invoice – Amendment: All the amendments to the e-invoice will be done on the GST portal only. JSON sent for the generation of e-invoice cannot be amended. IRN cannot be amended.
E-Invoice Cancellation: The e-invoice mechanism enables invoices to be cancelled. This will have to be reported to IRP within 24 hours. Data on IRP will be kept there only for 24 hours. Any cancellation after 24hrs could not be possible on IRP; however one can manually cancel the same on the GST portal before filing the returns. Further, E-invoice cannot be partially cancelled. It cannot be cancelled if a valid e-waybill exists for that IRN as goods are in movement. Edited (amended) invoice cannot be cancelled (even within 24 hours) and will be kept for an audit trail. IRN cannot be generated again on the same invoice number. IRN cannot be re-generated for the cancelled invoice. Fresh invoice needs to be raised for generating IRN.