E-invoicing mandatory for companies over Rs 100 crore revenue from January 1, 2021

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) Wednesday notified that e-invoicing will be mandatory for business to business (B2B) transactions for taxpayers having turnover of over Rs 100 crore from January 1, 2021.
At present, issuing electronic invoices is mandatory for businesses with turnover of Rs 500 crore and more, which has been put into effect from October 1, 2020.

"Aligned to the recent communications by various government officials, e-invoicing has now been notified for Rs 100 crore and above companies as well. With only approximately 50 more days, these mid size companies would need to soon gear up their processes/ IT systems to enable compliance with this new invoicing regulation," said Abhishek Jain, tax partner at EY.

E-invoicing replaces the physical invoice and will soon replace the existing e-way bill system, and taxpayers will not have to generate separate e-way bills, finance secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey said last month.

The government expects e-invoicing to have also other major advantages, such as improving the payment cycle for industry and giving boost to invoice-based lending to MSMEs.

The finance secretary had recently told ET that in the first few days, about 8 lakh e-invoices were issued per day. He added that the latest figures were above expectations. Over 69.5 lakh Invoice Reference Numbers (IRNs) generated between October 1 and October 7.

"We had anticipated it to be around 20-21 lakh because it applies only to companies with a turnover of more than Rs 500 crore, covering about 18,000 odd companies. However, e-invoice issuance as of October 30 has been over 29 lakh," he had said.