Introduction to E-Invoice under GST The Indian government has announced introduction of ‘E-Invoicing’ or ‘Electronic Invoicing’ for reporting of business to business (B2B) invoices to GST System, starting from 1st January 2020. It is important that your current SAP system accordingly allows you to seamlessly generate, submit and files E-Invoices into government portal without additional or manual data entry. The generated E-Invoice follows standard that is also machine readable and will have uniform interpretation across various stakeholders and the whole business ecosystem. This is a statutory requirement for all business processes to be compliant as per stipulated regulation from the government. SAP E-Invoice allows generation of E-Invoice, transmit to Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) via “authorized” GSP and receive a unique Invoice Reference Number (IRN), digitally signed E-Invoice and QR code. E-Invoice Scheme According to GSTIN, all accounting and billing software companies are being asked to adopt a separate E-Invoice standard so that their users can generate JSON from the software and upload the same to the IRP. All these software will adopt the new E-Invoice standard, in which they will re-align their data access and retrieval to the standard format. What are the benefits of E-Invoice? The following are some of the key benefits of E-Invoice:
  • Reduces reporting the same invoice details multiple times in different forms. It’s just one-time upload and everything, as required, will get pre-populated.
  • Part-A of e-Way bill will be auto-captured and only transporter details are required to be updated.
  • On uploading invoices, Sales and purchase register (ANX-1 and ANX-2) are pre-populated and from this data, the main Return (RET-1 or Sugam) is almost ready for filing under New GST Return.
  • Substantial reduction in input credit verification challenges as the same data will get reported to the tax department as well to the buyer in his inward supply (purchase) register.
  • On receipt of info through the GST System, a buyer can do reconciliation with his Purchase register and accept/reject it on time under New Return.
  • Complete trail of B2B invoices and system-level matching of input credit and output tax helps to reduce tax evasion
  • Increase efficiency in tax administration by eliminating fake invoices.
E-Invoice Portal (IRP)
E-Invoice Portal [Invoice Registration Portal – (IRP)] is going to perform the following-
  • Generate a unique IRN (Invoice Reference Number)
  • Digitally sign the E-Invoice
  • Generate a QR code
  • Send the signed E-Invoice to the recipient of the document on the email provided in the E-Invoice
Step of Generation of E-Invoice under GST
  • Generation of Invoice and JSON
  • Uploading of JSON
  • Validation of data by IRP(Invoice Registration Portal)
  • Sharing of E-Invoice
  • Returning the digitally signed JSON with IRN back to the seller along with a QR

E-Invoice Architecture

Automatic’s GST Reporting Package

In July 2017, Automatic helped over mid-large size organizations to successfully deploy GST in their SAP systems.

Subsequently, after extensive research with customers and partners, Automatic has developed a comprehensive GST reporting package. The GST reporting package solution enables customers to quickly deploy the most important reports in their SAP systems. Based on the customer’s special processes, business demands or GST/ASP partner relationship, Automatic’s consulting team can further help in streamlining the solution deployment in customer’s SAP eco-system. Automatic has developed an Integration Solution (SAP Utility + Web Service Solution) to help in GSTR reporting. This can help in providing the data to the GSP providers, who will have to just forward the data to the GSTN portal. The RFC modules delivered by Automatic package read the required Sales / advance receipt data and call a Web Service which will transfer the data to the GSP portal. The report can also be executed online for data verification (and displays the data in GRID layout). Exported data is stored in a customer table for future references.
Automatic’s E-invoicing Solution
A bi-directional RFC enabled function allows you to extract the E-Invoice specific information from your SAP system and provide it to the GSP. Upon successful processing and generation of the IRN number, this information can be received back in the SAP system for assignment to the SAP Invoice document and for generation of the necessary QR codes for output.
* SAP ECC EHP4 is the minimum requirement for generation of the QR code.