e-Invoice essentially involves reporting details of specified GST documents to a Government notified portal and obtaining a reference number. This number is called Invoice Reference Number (IRN).
e-Invoicing has many advantages for business such as standardization, inter-operability, auto population of invoice details into GST return thereby reducing processing costs, disputes, and improvement of payment cycles brining process efficiency.
Earlier in the month of October 2020, Government made e-Invoice applicable for companies with turnover more than 500 crores. Further, it was made applicable for companies with turnover more than 100 crores from January 2021.
One of our large pharma distributors approached Aosta to implement e-Invoicing with BackBone Application that they have been using since 2007. With many GSP Providers in the market, Aosta carefully analysed various providers and partnered with Cleartax to integrate BackBone to GST Portal. In Phase I, Excel Spreadsheets were used to export invoice data at a defined timed interval to the portal. This was cumbersome and laborious process for the staff to handle. Apart from the invoice generated in the system, we need to login to the portal to print the predefined invoice template with IRN and QR Code. We quickly stepped on to API integration to handshake the invoice details and obtained the IRN in real-time. We made small customization to the invoice to accommodate QR Code and IRN obtained from the portal.
Aosta completed the integration task in a record time of 2 weeks.