Is it mandatory to restart GST Invoice Number from 1 in every Financial Year?

• Mybusiness Filings
• 03 Apr 2525
• 92
• 1
• GST

Rule 46(b) read as under:

Rule 46 -  Subject to rule 54, a tax invoice referred to in section 31 shall be issued by the registered person containing the following particulars, namely,-

(b) a consecutive serial number not exceeding sixteen characters, in one or multiple series, containing alphabets or numerals or special characters-hyphen or dash and slash symbolised as “-” and “/” respectively, and any combination thereof, unique for a financial year;

Upon reading the above rule, you can see that it imposes mainly two mandatory requirements on the taxpayer for GST Invoice Numbering, which is - 

1) 'Consecutive' and

2) 'Unique' 

The above rule nowhere mandates to restart the invoice numbering from 1 every year. You just need to make your invoice numbers in consecutive series and it should be unique for all years.

What is Unique Invoice Number?

1) For example, if you have raised Invoice Numbers from 1 to 3056 in FY 2024-25 then you can start your invoices from 3057 in FY 2025-26. Because by doing so, your invoice numbers are still unique for each year and there is no duplicacy and conflict between the invoice numbers of each year. There is no such requirement to start afresh the invoice numbers from 1 again.

2) But if you want to start invoice numbers afresh from 1 again in new financial year, then you can do so by adding a unique prefix or suffix in each year to your invoice numbers e.g. 2024-05/1 or 2025-26/1 or 1/2024-25 or 1/2025-26 etc. This way you can start from invoice number 1 in each year and still your numbers will be unique.

To understand the legal aspect of this, we need to look at Rule 46(b) of CGST Rules, 2017 which deals with Tax Invoice Numbering in GST.