GST E-Invoice & E-Way Bill Compliance in TallyPrime: The Complete 2026 Checklist

GST e-invoicing and e-way bill rules used to be something you set up once and mostly forgot about. That stopped being true somewhere around early 2025. Since then, GSTN has rolled out mandatory multi-factor authentication, tightened e-way bill validity windows, extended the 30-day invoice reporting rule to more businesses, launched a second e-way bill portal, and — most recently — proposed and then paused a new Ship-To GSTIN requirement.

If you run TallyPrime and haven't checked in on this since your original e-invoicing setup, this post is a status check: exactly what's mandatory right now, what's coming, and what's been put on hold — as of September 2026.

Where Things Actually Stand Right Now

Worth repeating: GST rules move fast enough that a "current as of" date matters more here than in most compliance content. Always cross-check the live status on the official e-invoice portal or e-way bill portal before making changes to your process based on any article, including this one.

1. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — Fully Mandatory Since April 2025

MFA requires logging into the GST portal with a username, password, and an OTP sent to the mobile number registered against the GSTIN (the Sandes app is also accepted as a delivery channel for the OTP). The rollout happened in stages:

• 1 January 2025 — mandatory for taxpayers with turnover above ₹20 crore
• 1 February 2025 — mandatory for taxpayers with turnover above ₹5 crore
• 1 April 2025 — mandatory for every GST portal user, regardless of turnover, including sub-users and transporters

If your business hasn't touched this setup since before April 2025, there are two things worth checking today:

• Is the mobile number on your GSTIN still current? If it's an old number, a former employee's phone, or simply out of service, you can get locked out of portal access at an inconvenient moment.
• Do your sub-users each have their own registered mobile number? MFA applies per user, not just per GSTIN — a shared login without individually verified numbers is a common way businesses get caught out.

How This Affects TallyPrime Specifically

It's worth being precise here, because the answer isn't quite "you'll be prompted for an OTP every time you save an invoice in Tally." TallyPrime doesn't log into the e-invoice or e-way bill portal directly for every transaction — it works through an API user profile, created once during your one-time e-invoicing/e-way bill setup, with Tally (India) Pvt Ltd acting as your GSP (GST Suvidha Provider). That registration process itself involves OTP verification, but day-to-day IRN and e-way bill generation from within TallyPrime runs through this API credential rather than a fresh manual login each time.

Where MFA becomes directly relevant to a Tally user is anywhere you or your team log into the e-invoice or e-way bill portal itself — checking a return's status, correcting a rejected invoice, downloading historical data, or managing your API user profile. If your accounts team does any of that regularly, make sure their registered numbers are current before it becomes a mid-task problem.

2. The 30-Day IRP Reporting Window — Now Covers ₹10 Crore+ Businesses

If your aggregate annual turnover (AATO) crosses ₹10 crore, you cannot report an invoice to the Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) more than 30 days after the invoice date. Miss the window, and the IRP simply rejects the upload — no IRN is issued, and without an IRN the invoice isn't valid for GST purposes. This rule was first applied to businesses above ₹100 crore back in November 2023, and was extended down to the ₹10 crore threshold from 1 April 2025.

This is the rule that quietly punishes batch-upload habits. If your team is used to exporting a week's or a month's invoices and uploading them together, a single administrative delay can push some of them past the 30-day mark. The practical fix is uploading closer to real time — which is exactly what TallyPrime's e-invoicing integration is built to do, generating the IRN as part of saving the invoice rather than as a separate end-of-period task.

The stakes are worth spelling out: under Section 122 of the CGST Act, failing to issue a required e-invoice can attract a penalty of ₹10,000 per invoice or the tax amount involved, whichever is higher, and an incorrect e-invoice can draw a ₹25,000 penalty per invoice. A missed 30-day window that results in a rejected upload effectively falls into "failed to issue," which is not a cheap mistake to make repeatedly.

If you're between ₹5 crore and ₹10 crore turnover, this rule doesn't apply to you yet — but given how consistently GSTN has extended this window downward, it's reasonable to treat it as a preview of where the threshold is headed, and to get comfortable with real-time reporting before it becomes mandatory for your bracket too.

3. E-Way Bills Now Have a Shelf Life — 180-Day and 360-Day Limits

Two related restrictions apply to every e-way bill generator, regardless of turnover, since 1 January 2025:

• 180-day document age limit: you can only generate an e-way bill against an invoice, delivery challan, or similar base document dated within the last 180 days. Older documents are rejected outright.
• 360-day extension cap: an e-way bill's validity can be extended (as before, from up to 8 hours before expiry to 8 hours after), but total extensions are now capped at 360 days from the original generation date. Once that ceiling is hit, no further extension is possible — a fresh e-way bill is required, which in turn depends on the base document still falling inside the 180-day window.

For most retail and fast-moving inventory businesses, this changes nothing day-to-day. It matters more for businesses with long dispatch cycles, project-based delivery schedules, or goods that sit against older purchase orders before movement — transport and logistics operators, real estate/construction material suppliers, and anyone managing staged deliveries against a single large order. If that's you, this is worth a validation check at the point a shipment is scheduled, not something to discover when an e-way bill generation fails on the day of dispatch.

4. E-Way Bill 2.0 — A Second Portal Running in Parallel

Since 1 July 2025, GSTN has run a second e-way bill portal (E-Way Bill 2.0) alongside the original one, kept in real-time sync with it. E-way bills generated on either portal can be viewed, updated, or extended on the other — GSTN refers to this as "criss-cross" operation. The practical benefit is resilience: if one portal has downtime or maintenance, the other keeps your business moving instead of everything stopping.

For most TallyPrime users this runs invisibly in the background through your API integration. It's worth knowing it exists mainly so that "the e-way bill portal is down" isn't automatically true anymore — there's now a second path available.

5. Ship-To GSTIN — Proposed, Delayed, Currently Paused

This is the one worth watching rather than acting on immediately. GSTN proposed making the Ship-To GSTIN a mandatory field for Bill-To/Ship-To e-way bill transactions — cases where you invoice one party but deliver goods to a different registered location (a distributor billing one entity while shipping to a customer's warehouse, for example). The rollout date moved from 15 June 2026 to 1 August 2026, and as of the most recent update, GSTN has paused implementation until further notice.

If and when it does take effect, the shape of the requirement is already fairly well defined: the GSTIN of the actual delivery location must be captured for qualifying transactions, with "URP" (Unregistered Person) entered where the consignee has no GST registration. It would apply not just to manual portal use but to e-way bills generated through ERP, ASP, GSP, or direct API integration — meaning TallyPrime users with Bill-To/Ship-To arrangements would need this captured in party master data, not just entered manually at generation time.

Practical takeaway: don't build anything specifically for this yet since it's on hold, but if your business regularly does Bill-To/Ship-To transactions, it's a reasonable moment to review whether your consignee master data is clean and complete anyway. That's useful regardless of whether this specific rule resumes.

What This Means If You're Running Custom TDL

A pattern worth noticing across nearly every rule above: the businesses that handle these changes smoothly are the ones where compliance logic lives in the system, not in a person's memory of "the rules as of last time I checked." A few concrete examples:

• Real-time IRN generation (rather than batch upload) is what keeps you clear of the 30-day window without anyone having to track dates manually.
• Automated validation against the 180-day document rule at the point a dispatch is scheduled catches a problem before it blocks a shipment, instead of after.
• Clean, complete party master data — GSTIN, registered address, consignee details — is what makes any future requirement (Ship-To GSTIN included, if it resumes) a non-event instead of a scramble.
• Retry and acknowledgment logic on your API integration means a temporary portal hiccup doesn't silently fail a transaction — it flags for someone to check.

None of this requires exotic customization — it's the kind of thing well-built TDL handles quietly in the background. The businesses that end up scrambling when a new rule lands are usually the ones treating compliance as a manual checklist rather than something their ERP setup enforces on its own.

A Practical Compliance Checklist

1. Confirm the mobile number registered against your GSTIN (and each sub-user's number) is current and accessible.
2. If your AATO is ₹10 crore+, verify your e-invoicing workflow reports in near-real time rather than in periodic batches.
3. If you run long dispatch cycles or staged deliveries, add a 180-day document-age check at the point of dispatch scheduling, not just at e-way bill generation.
4. Periodically review open e-way bills against the 360-day extension ceiling so nothing gets stranded mid-transit with no renewal option.
5. If you handle Bill-To/Ship-To transactions, clean up consignee GSTIN data now — useful regardless of whether the paused rule resumes.
6. Re-check this list every quarter. Given the pace of change since 2025, "we set this up once" is no longer a safe assumption.

Getting Your Tally Setup Ahead of the Next Rule Change

Every rule on this list has landed within about 18 months of each other. There's no reason to expect that pace to slow down. If you'd rather have your e-invoicing, e-way bill, and master data handling audited and hardened now — instead of finding gaps the next time GSTN pushes an advisory — AndurilTech's TDL team can review your current setup and fix what needs fixing before it becomes urgent.

Get your Tally GST setup reviewed →