Mumbai, 08/01/20: GSTN today conducted a consultation workshop with
leading companies developing business software in Mumbai. The workshop was
focussed on to create synergy within the software for e-invoicing process. As
per the proposed timelines, all organizations with annual turnover above Rs 500
Crore (from 1st January 2020 onwards) and all organizations with turnover over
Rs 100 Crore (from 2nd February 2020 onwards) are able to participate in the
trial on a voluntary basis. E-Invoice will become mandatory for all registered
taxpayers with annual aggregate turnover of over Rs 100 Cr. from 1st April
2020, onwards. More details are available at https://www.gstn.org/e-invoice/ .
GSTN
has kicked off a multi-city campaign on E-Invoice, in partnership with trade
bodies- CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM, PHDCCI and NASSCOM. GSTN conducted special demo
sessions in 7 cities namely New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bengaluru
and Pune in the month of December 2019.
Over 100 software and product development companies in
the accounting and billing space e.g. invoicing and billing software, solution
providers for GST, GSPs, ASPs, etc. have actively participated in this
multicity initiative, so far. Participants invited from industry bodies included
representatives of top business software organisations such as Microsoft , TCS,
Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tally, Oracle, Busy and Sap participated in the workshop.
GSTN would continue to conduct such briefing sessions at various key cities
across the country.
Speaking
on the occasion, Mr Prakash Kumar, CEO-GSTN said, “The session was the next
step of what was approved by the GST council as the standard of e-invoicing
during its 37th meeting held on 20th Sept 2019.
The council also published the schema on its portal. Recognising the
abstruse nature of the procedure, the GSTN felt the need to come up with an
explanatory document to clear all kinds of confusions.”
The
GST Council has approved the introduction of E-invoicing in a phased manner for
reporting of business to business (B2B) invoices to GST System, starting from
1st January 2020 on a voluntary basis. The machine readability and uniform
interpretation is the key objective. This is also important for reporting the
details to the GST System as part of Return. Apart from the GST System,
adoption a standard will also ensure that an e-invoice shared by a seller with
his buyer or bank or agent or any other player in the whole business ecosystem
can be read by machines and obviate and hence eliminate data entry errors.
“No
changes are required as far as the businesses are concerned as they will
continue to use the same software with same user interface to generate the
e-invoices such as ERP, accounting and billing software, excel based billing
system etc. The companies which have developed the ERP or billing software will
have to make changes in their software codes to make them conform to the
approved standards.” Added Mr Prakash Kumar.
E-Invoice
or Electronic invoice is generated by a large number of businesses today.
However, they all use the format as provided by the ERP or billing software
they use. Lack of a standard format leads to a scenario where e-invoice
generated on one billing software can’t be read by another, requiring manual
data entry from electronically generated invoice. A standard e-invoicing system
will ensure complete
inter-operability of e-invoices across the entire GST eco-system and will
eliminate the need for manual data entry mitigating chances of errors.The
e-invoice standard was drafted in consultation with trade/industry bodies and
ICAI and the same has now been approved by the GST Council. The workshop
focusses on standardisation of e-invoicing across business software platforms.
Apart
from developing synergies with the business software providers, GSTN is also
trying to clarify misconceptions and doubts about e-Invoice through other
channels. The document uploaded on the web portal https://www.gstn.org/e-invoice/ is an attempt to explain the concept of e-invoice, how
it operates and basics of standards. It also contains FAQs which answer the
questions raised by people who responded to the draft e-invoice standard used
for public consultation. It is expected that the document will also be useful
for the taxpayers, tax consultants and the software companies to adopt the
designed standard.
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