Over 495 lakh e-invoices for GST generated on the NIC portal within the first month of introduction

The path-breaking e-invoice initiative in the GST system which completed one month on the October 31, is poised to revolutionise the way businesses interact with each other.

According to the National Informatics Centre (NIC), within the first month of introduction itself, more than 495 lakh e-invoices were generated on the NIC portal by 27,400 tax payers.

The e-invoice system, the game changer in the GST system, was launched on October 1 for the businesses with aggregate turnover of more than Rs 500 crore in the financial year, it said.

It will be yet another milestone in India’s journey in enhancing ease of doing business. The data captured by the Invoice Registration Portal will flow seamlessly to GSTR1 return of the tax payer in GST Common Portal (gst.gov.in), thus reducing the compliance burden.

Starting with 8.4 lakh e-invoices on October 1, the usage has gradually picked up and October 31 saw generation of as many as 35 lakh e-invoices in a single day. This, coupled with generation of 641 lakh e-way bills during the month of October, establishes the robustness of the system.

Currently, there are three modes of generations of IRN in NIC system. First is the direct API interface of ERP system of tax payer with NIC system. Second is the API interface of ERP system of the tax payer through GSP with NIC system. Third is using the offline tool for bulk uploading of invoices and generating IRNs.

Around 15 per cent of the tax payers are using the offline tool for the IRN generations and 85 per cent are integrating through API, the National Informatics Centre said.

The Government is planning to reduce the aggregate turnover cut off to Rs 100 Crores for generation of IRN by the tax payers in coming days. NIC has already enabled the API and offline tool based trial sites for these tax payers and geared up with the required infrastructure to handle the generation of e-invoices from these tax payers, it said.