How to manage e-way bills with ease

When moving goods worth more than Rs. 50,000 between states or within a state in India, transporters must now carry a valid e-way bill along with the corresponding invoice or risk being detained — goods may even be seized. So companies have plenty of incentive to get e-way bills right, but do they have the necessary tools?

Generating e-way bills manually is a painstaking, error-prone task, especially with hundreds or thousands of transactions a day, which is why businesses are turning to technological solutions to help manage the load. 

Here’s what you should expect from an automated e-way bill solution:

Simple dashboard for quick, easy tracking

Imagine thousands of invoices in a system with no indication as to whether an e-way bill has been issued or not. Tracking would become cumbersome, and the chances of missing an invoice would be high.  

An efficient software solution, on the other hand, should show the invoice and e-way bill status simultaneously, while allowing you to download the e-way bill directly from the dashboard.  

Further, the software should recognize when an e-way bill is needed and when it isn’t, qualifying invoices that have a value of more than Rs. 50,000. 

Retrieve invoice data quickly

Your software should automatically pull the information needed to generate an e-way bill from the related invoice, so that you don’t have to enter it manually. The needed invoice details include:

1.  Transaction type (“outward” in case of sale transactions; “inward” in case of purchase transactions)

2.  Document number

3.  Document date

4.  Consignor GSTIN 

5.  Consignee GSTIN 

6.  Description

7.  HSN

8.  Quantity

9.  Tax value

10. Tax rate (CGST, SGST, IGST, and cess)

11. Taxable amount

12. Tax amount (CGST, SGST, IGST, and cess)

Validate data

The details included on each e-way bill, such as the HSN code and tax rate, must be correct or a tax officer may seize the goods and impose a penalty. A compliant software will have built-in validation checkpoints for crosschecking the e-way bill’s details.

Flexibility in generating e-way bills

Sometimes an invoice is issued, but the goods remain in the warehouse for a few more days. Customers may request the supplier hold orders, or transporters or vehicles might not be available. 

Thus, your software should be flexible enough to allow you to generate an e-way bill either while entering the invoice or at a later date, as per your choice. 

You may also need to generate e-way bills quickly for unusual situations, such as for a purchase from an unregistered vendor, for registered vendors who are unable to issue e-way bills themselves, or for when a delivery vehicle breaks down, so that the supply of goods isn’t hampered. 

Grouping invoices to create one e-way bill

How about handing over multiple invoices to a transporter who has to generate multiple e-way bills for all the goods transported in a single vehicle to a single state? 

To make things easy for the transporter, GST authorities permit generating a consolidated e-way bill for all bills from the same state, place of supply, vehicle number, and mode of transport. But the process is not a cakewalk. 

Before generating consolidated e-way bills, taxpayers have to generate separate e-way bills for each invoice, then club them together to generate a consolidated e-way bill.

A quality software will group e-way bills based on the four parameters mentioned above so that the taxpayer can generate a consolidated e-way bill in a single click. 

If the way you handle e-way bills is less than efficient, it may be time to rethink your approach. Avalara India GST integrates all the features discussed above to provide a fast, easily manageable e-way bill process. Our software also keeps track of the e-way bills issued, deleted, and re-issued. 

Avalara is an experienced application service provider (ASP) and partner of authorized GST Suvidha Providers (GSPs). To understand how our cloud-based application, Avalara India GST, can help you with GSTR-1 to -9, as well as e-way bill creation, contact us through https://www.avalara.com/in/en/products/gst-returns-filing.html.