GST e-invoicing mandatory from October

No further relaxation is likely in terms of e-invoicing as the Centre is set to go ahead with the decision to make GST e-invoicing mandatory for companies with annual turnover of over Rs 500 crore for their business-to-business transactions starting October 1.

Industry representatives, however, have urged the government to not make it mandatory and rather allow voluntary compliance.

The relief, however, would be there for relatively smaller businesses, as the threshold for mandatory e-invoicing, a step to improve tax compliance, was earlier planned to be kept at Rs 100 crore, is set to be raised to Rs 500 crore on the recommendations of an empowered panel of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council.

The initial date for its roll out was April 1, 2020, but the Centre notified October 1, 2020, as revised date for implementation of e-invoicing.

As per the website of the Good and Service Network 'e-invoicing' has many advantages for businesses such as standardisation, interoperability, auto-population of invoice details into GST return and other forms (like e-way bill), reduction in processing costs, reduction in disputes, improvement in payment cycles and thereby improving overall business efficiency.