In this week at the Truecopy headquarters, we celebrated the festive season with a Bollywood gala. There was enthusiastic preparation that began two weeks prior to the event. Even though the event is over, the “mahol” is still filmy. Naturally, when we brainstormed for our next blog post the topic that emerged was – Invoice ka usool hai madam, no digital signature, no payment!
Big companies are insisting that their vendors and dealers and associates send them digitally signed invoices else the payment would be put on hold. This is not an arbitrary move to cause intentional inconvenience to anyone, there is a solid rationale for doing this. With the move from paper invoices to registered e-invoices in 2020, signatures gradually shifted from manual to digital to completely automate the invoicing process for companies.
Today, most of the vendors, dealers and associates are now under the ambit of mandatory registration of e-invoices. These e-invoices have the QR code and IRN embedded in them. The recipients of these e-invoices are the big companies that want to extend automation to the inbound invoices and that would include –
- 1. Validation of the sender.
- 2. Validation of the QR code
The digital signature of the sender can be easily verified using the signature verification engine on the server and the QR code can be validated after verifying the GSTN’s digital signature on the QR code. Further to the validation, the information from the QR can be extracted and stored in the ERP for approval and future reference. So, no digital signature, no validation and therefore no payment! It’s quite logical.
Digital signatures and invoices go hand-in-hand quite like a typical Bollywood celebrity couple. One is rarely seen without the other. However, a Bollywood celebrity couple may or may not last but digital signatures and invoices are here to live happily ever after.
–“Image credits to respective owners.”–
