Page 41 - GSTL_13th August 2020_Vol 39_Part 2

2020 ] NEWS DESK J49
New e-invoice format
Adopting it from October 1 will be tough for firms
For almost all tax laws in India, taxpayers can be bunched into three cat-
egories - those who follow the law diligently without complaints, those who
don’t like the law very much but still follow it to the extent possible, and those
that exist only to hoodwink the lawmakers. Ever since the GST was rolled out,
there have been quite a few who are in the third category.
Their typical process involves taking credit on fake invoices, not subject-
ing all their sales to tax, and claiming a GST refund and vanishing. The bosses at
CBIC (Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs) have had the thankless task
of keeping up with a law that changes almost every week and keeping an eye out
for those who thought of the GST as a source to generate cash flow than to ex-
pend it. One of the ways in which the CBIC thought of minimising loss of reve-
nue was to introduce a system of e-invoicing.
Through Notification Nos. 60 and 61 of 2020, the CBIC has introduced
the system of e-invoicing that will come into effect from October 1, 2020. The
threshold limit for those who have to mandatorily issue e-invoices has been gen-
erously increased from ` 100 crore to ` 500 crore. SEZ units, banking and insur-
ance companies, goods transport agencies, passenger transport services and ad-
missions to exhibition of cinematographic films have been exempted from
e-invoicing. Notification No. 60 has also made changes to the existing format of
the e-invoice for GST INV-1.
GST INV-1
One look at Form GST INV-1 is sufficient to prompt companies to tweak
their ERP systems to enable them generate e-invoices. The schema of the
e-invoice has technical field names for basic details, document period, preceding
document, receipt, supplier information, recipient, payee and delivery infor-
mation and invoice item details, etc. There are totally 18 field names which have
been further broken up into 130 sub-fields.
The scheme also uses terms which only software geeks can understand.
Here’s a sample :
Cardinality means whether reporting of the item(s) is mandatory or op-
tional as explained below :
0..1 : It means that reporting of item is optional and when reported,
the same cannot be repeated.
1..1 : It means that reporting of item is mandatory but cannot be re-
peated.
1..n : It means that reporting of item is mandatory and can be re-
peated more than once.
0..n : It means that reporting of item is optional but can be repeated
more than once if reported. For example, previous invoice refer-
ence is optional but if required one can mention many previous in-
voice references.
To get the new system up and running before October 1 is going to be a
hard task even for companies that have the resources to implement and budgets
to spend. Due to the shortage of time, the ERP vendors will probably come up
GST LAW TIMES  13th August 2020  41