Export Invoice Format: Every Field It Must Carry

What the rule requires

Rule 46 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Rules, 2017 lists the particulars a tax invoice issued by a registered person must contain. For an exporter the list is the whole skeleton of the document:

• the name, address and GSTIN of the supplier;
• a consecutive serial number not exceeding sixteen characters, in one or more series, made of letters, numerals, hyphen and slash, unique for a financial year;
• the date of issue;
• the HSN code for goods or services, to the number of digits notified for the exporter's turnover class;
• the description of the goods or services;
• the quantity and unit, or Unique Quantity Code, for goods;
• the total value of the supply;
• the taxable value after any discount or abatement;
• the rate and amount of tax, which for an export under bond or LUT is zero, and for an export on payment of IGST is the IGST charged;
• the place of supply with the name of the State, and the address of delivery where it differs;
• whether tax is payable on reverse charge;
• the signature or digital signature of the supplier or an authorised representative, which is not required on an electronic invoice issued under the Information Technology Act, 2000;
• and, where the exporter is required to issue e-invoices under rule 48(4), the QR code carrying the Invoice Reference Number.

The two changes for an export

The same rule then makes two substitutions for an export of goods or services.

First, the invoice carries an endorsement, one of two exact phrases: "SUPPLY MEANT FOR EXPORT/SUPPLY TO SEZ UNIT OR SEZ DEVELOPER FOR AUTHORISED OPERATIONS ON PAYMENT OF INTEGRATED TAX", or "SUPPLY MEANT FOR EXPORT/SUPPLY TO SEZ UNIT OR SEZ DEVELOPER FOR AUTHORISED OPERATIONS UNDER BOND OR LETTER OF UNDERTAKING WITHOUT PAYMENT OF INTEGRATED TAX". Which one depends on how the export is being made: with IGST paid and later refunded, or under a Letter of Undertaking without paying it. The GST refund guide covers what each route needs afterwards.

Second, in place of the recipient details a domestic invoice carries, an export invoice carries the name and address of the recipient, the address of delivery, and the name of the country of destination. A foreign buyer has no GSTIN, so none is expected. Which route an exporter is on decides what comes after the invoice: the IGST refund for one, the eBRC either way.

What customs adds

Rule 46 is a GST rule and does not mention the IEC. Customs does: the shipping bill is filed under the exporter's IEC and Part II of the bill reproduces each invoice, so the invoice should carry the ten-character IEC, the invoice number and date exactly as they will be declared, the currency, the terms of delivery (FOB, CIF, CFR and so on), and the freight, insurance, commission and discount shown separately whenever they are part of the price. Those are the figures customs backs out to reach the FOB value, and the same figures appear again on the eBRC. The shipping bill format guide shows where each lands on the bill.

The invoice number deserves its own sentence. Rule 46 caps the serial at sixteen characters. The eBRC filing carries the invoice number in a twenty-character field, so a rule-compliant number always fits. The numbers that do not fit are the ones assembled from a project code, a buyer reference and a running number joined together, and those are also the ones a bank truncates on the remittance advice. Keep the serial short and put the references in their own lines.

What the bank adds

The bank that receives the payment reports it to DGFT as an inward remittance message, and that message has to be matched to the invoice or shipping bill it paid for. The invoice makes that possible when it carries the exporter's bank account, the IFSC, and the seven-digit AD code of the branch, the currency of the sale, the payment terms (advance, at sight, or days from the bill of lading date), and the buyer named exactly as the remitter will be. DGFT's own eBRC guideline warns when the AD code on the shipping bill and on the remittance differ, so use the same branch on the invoice, the shipping bill and the remittance instructions. The AD code guide explains how the branch is registered at a port.

For a service export there is no shipping bill at all. The invoice is the export document, the one a SOFTEX form (for software) or the realisation itself is filed against, so the same fields matter more, not less. The service exporters guide and the SOFTEX guide cover that path; the invoice carries the SAC code instead of an HSN code, and DGFT's guideline allows a service invoice to be attached to a remittance only where the SAC codes match the service described.

The format, assembled

Source: Rule 46, CGST Rules, 2017; the DGFT self-certified eBRC generation guidelines, version 1.0 of 10 November 2023.

The three sums the invoice has to survive

Quantity times rate on every line. The lines against the subtotal. The subtotal plus tax and charges, less discount, against the stated total. Every office that reads the invoice runs at least one of these, and an invoice that fails one is the invoice whose payment will not map to it later. If you want the arithmetic checked before the document goes anywhere, the free export invoice extractor reads the PDF, returns every field above as CSV and runs exactly those three sums.