eBRC, from the first remittance to the last claim.

What the certificate proves, who issues it, when you actually need one, the three ways to generate it, and the money that waits on it. Every guide we have written, in the order you would want to read them.

Already know what one is? Go straight to generating your first eBRC, or create a free account and file it from your own workspace.

What an eBRC is

An eBRC is an Electronic Bank Realisation Certificate: a digital document issued through the DGFT that certifies an export payment was received and realised in India. If you have only ever seen the abbreviation, the full form and what each word is doing is worth two minutes. If you want the plain version of what the certificate is for, start here instead.

It replaced the paper Bank Realisation Certificate that banks once issued on request, and the difference is not cosmetic: the two documents are produced by different people. The paper BRC was your bank certifying to you. The eBRC is you certifying to the DGFT, on the strength of data your bank has already sent.

That change happened in November 2023, and it is the single fact that explains most of the confusion exporters still have. The certificate is now self-certified. Nobody at your bank produces it. Nobody at the DGFT produces it. Your bank reports the inward remittance; you map it to what it paid for; the DGFT issues against that mapping.

The two records that have to meet

Everything in the process is one idea repeated: an inward remittance has to be matched to the export it paid for.

The remittance side arrives on its own. Your bank pushes each inward payment to the DGFT as an IRM, an Inward Remittance Message, and it turns up against your IEC with a status of Fresh, Amended or Cancelled. When one does not turn up, there is a short list of reasons and a shorter list of things to ask your bank, and keeping that side tidy is most of the work: the housekeeping routine is what makes audits boring.

The export side is whatever evidences the shipment or the service: a shipping bill for goods, a SOFTEX form for software, an invoice for services. Two fields on the remittance decide whether the mapping is even allowed, and both are codes rather than words: the purpose code and the currency code. A wrong purpose code is the most common reason a filing that looks right is refused.

When you actually need one

Not every export needs a certificate, and the honest answer to whether it is mandatory is that it depends on what you are claiming. Where it is not optional is anywhere money comes back to you.

It is the evidence behind RoDTEP and duty drawback claims, and it supports GST refunds on the export of services, where there is no shipping bill to speak for you. On the compliance side it is how realisation is evidenced under FEMA, which runs on a nine month clock with extensions that most exporters discover late. Shipping bills carry their own parallel obligation in RBI’s ledger, and an open EDPMS entry costs you quietly for as long as it stays open.

Put together, that is a short list of ways the money never arrives, which is why most incentive money is lost to paperwork rather than to eligibility.

Who can generate one

Wider than most people assume. A freelancer or service exporter is an exporter under Indian law, with no shipping bill anywhere in the process, and software exporters file through SOFTEX. Payment platforms and cross-border finance companies sit in a different seat again, generating certificates for their own customers.

Two documents get confused with the eBRC constantly, and the distinction matters when an auditor asks: a FIRC is not an eBRC, and FIRA, FIRC and eBRC each prove a different thing. Your bank sits behind all of it through your AD code, which is worth understanding before it causes a problem rather than after.

The three ways to generate one

There are exactly three, and the comparison between them is short.

You can do it yourself: how to generate an eBRC on the DGFT portal, step by step, including the checks that stop a filing from bouncing. You can do it in a workspace, which is one connection instead of a portal session every time. Or you can do it from inside your own product over an API, where the real question is which of the two available APIs fits your shape, and what integrating actually involves.

Whichever route you take, two habits pay for themselves. Rehearse before you file: a test mode run costs nothing and nothing is legally binding. And once you are filing more than a handful, move to a spreadsheet workflow that validates every row before anything is submitted.

After the certificate exists

A certificate is only useful if you can produce it on demand. Checking status and downloading the PDF and copying the eBRC number are the two things you will do most often, usually because somebody else has asked for them.

For the vocabulary that turns up in every DGFT screen and every bank email, there is a glossary, and a checklist worth keeping. The whole thing end to end, as one long read, is the playbook.

हिंदी में पढ़ना पसंद करें तो eBRC क्या है, eBRC कैसे बनाएं और स्टेटस कैसे देखें पढ़ें।

Where ebrc.in comes in

ebrc.in takes the chase out of it. You connect your DGFT account once and your inward remittances arrive on their own. You map them to the invoices and shipping bills they paid for, ebrc.in checks the filing before it goes, and the certificate comes back, usually in about two hours, into a ledger you can search, export to Excel and pull a PDF from years later. The eBRC exporter app is free at any volume, with no certificate limit and no paid tier for exporters, and no card at sign-up. Platforms and enterprises get the same thing over a REST API.

That is worth as much to a desk filing twice a year as to one filing twice a week, and arguably more. Checking a filing before it goes matters most to someone who has not done this recently. A rehearsal in Test mode matters most to someone who has never done it at all. And a searchable record matters most two years later, when a claim or an audit asks for a certificate and the filing session is long forgotten.

None of that changes who issues the certificate. The DGFT does, on every route, and everything explained above is true whether you file through ebrc.in or on the portal. That is the design rather than a limitation: the eBRC is self-certified, the DGFT publishes a first-party route for filing it through software, and ebrc.in is one intended way to do it.

There is no lock-in in either direction: PDFs, eBRC numbers and a full Excel export are always available, because a certificate you cannot take with you is not much of a certificate.

Frequently asked questions

Every guide, including the ones not linked above, is in Resources.