Electronic Invoice is a broad search, so this page starts with the only questions that narrow it: how your bills get raised, how many people raise them, and what has to come out at the end of the month.
The four questions that actually narrow it down
Feature lists do not distinguish billing products, because they all have the same features. These four answers do.
How does a bill get raised? At a counter with a queue, seconds per bill is the only thing that matters. On a site or after an event, the detail matters and the speed does not. Monthly against a connection or a contract, it is a schedule and what matters is that last month is remembered.
How many people bill? One person can use anything, including a spreadsheet. Two people need one shared record and one centrally issued numbering series, and that single requirement rules out every file-based approach.
What has to come out at the end of the month? An invoice total, or GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B figures, or a full set of accounts. These are three different products and buying the wrong size is the usual mistake.
What happens when the internet drops? If the answer is "billing stops and that is a disaster", you want installed software and no amount of cloud enthusiasm should change that.
Electronic invoicing means two different things in India
This is worth separating carefully, because the terms overlap and the obligations do not.
In general use, an electronic invoice just means an invoice produced and sent digitally rather than written in a book. There is no particular obligation attached; a PDF emailed to a customer is an electronic invoice in this sense, and has been fine for years.
In Indian GST, e-invoicing is a specific statutory process: the invoice is reported to an Invoice Registration Portal before it is issued, the portal returns an Invoice Reference Number and a signed QR code, and the invoice is not valid without them. It applies to businesses above a turnover threshold that has been lowered repeatedly, so whether it applies to you is a question with a current answer rather than a settled one — check the notification in force.
So "electronic invoicing software" might mean either. If you are above the threshold you need the second, and the thing to ask any vendor is how the IRN is obtained and what happens when the portal is unavailable. This product prepares the e-invoice payload for the portal; the registration itself happens there, not here.
What you get, free
- Complete GST tax invoices — every legally required field, tax split per line, not a template with a tax box.
- Customers stored once with GSTIN, address and state.
- Items stored once with HSN or SAC, rate and tax.
- Tax derived, not chosen — CGST and SGST or IGST, from the place of supply against your registration state.
- One numbering series, issued centrally, consecutive within the financial year.
- Stock that moves as you bill, so a closing figure means something.
- A receivables position — who owes what, aged, without adding anything up.
- PDF invoices to print, email or send on WhatsApp.
- Full export to CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one.
- ₹0 — no card, no expiry, not a trial.
Moving off a spreadsheet without losing a month
- Pick a cut-off date. The start of a month or a quarter is easiest to reconcile against.
- Tidy the spreadsheet first: one row per invoice, no merged cells, GSTINs in their own column.
- Import customers, then items. Fix what the import reports rather than what you assume it got wrong.
- Enter only the unpaid invoices. Settled history can stay in the file — you need the balances, not the archive.
- Set the next invoice number to carry on from the last one you issued, so the series stays consecutive across the move.
- Bill everything from the cut-off date onwards in the new system and keep the old file read-only.
- Reconcile one month both ways before you stop maintaining the spreadsheet.
The numbering series, which is where file-based billing fails
The rule is short: a consecutive serial number, unique within the financial year, not more than sixteen characters, using only letters, numbers, hyphens and slashes. One series, or clearly separated series where you genuinely need more than one, each consecutive in itself.
A file cannot enforce any part of that. The number is typed, so it can be repeated, skipped, or quietly rolled back when yesterday's invoice is edited into today's. Nothing notices, and the duplicate is found at return time rather than at billing time — a month after it happened, when the customer already holds their copy.
The forgotten half is cancellation. A cancelled invoice keeps its number and stays in the series as cancelled. Deleting the row and reusing the number leaves a gap in your books and a figure in your customer's, and reconciling those two is a long afternoon with a bad ending.
This is the most practical argument for a system over a file and it has nothing to do with features. It is the one thing a file structurally cannot do.
What this product is not for
Worth saying directly, because every page in this category is written the other way round and it wastes people's time.
It is not full double-entry accounting. There is no chart of accounts, no journal entries, no bank reconciliation and no balance sheet. It produces clean exportable figures for an accountant who does that work.
It is not an ERP. No production planning, no bill of materials, no payroll, no approval hierarchies across departments.
It is not installed software. It runs in a browser and needs a connection to issue a bill, so a counter that loses internet for hours should choose something local.
And it does not integrate with hardware beyond a printer and a USB scanner — no weighing scales, no fuel dispensers, no serial-port cash drawers. If something at your counter has to speak to the software directly, that decides it.
What it does do is the shared middle: correct GST documents, a numbering series that holds, tax computed rather than typed, stock, receivables, and figures a return can be built from.
CGST, SGST and IGST — worked out, not chosen
Whether a sale attracts CGST and SGST or IGST is not a preference. It follows from the place of supply: same state as your registration means the tax splits into central and state halves, a different state means one integrated tax at the combined rate.
That sounds simple and goes wrong constantly, because it is a dropdown in most billing software and a dropdown is something a tired person clicks past. In Billixo the split is derived from the state on the customer record against the state on your registration, and it changes the moment either does.
The consequence of getting it wrong is real: an IGST invoice raised as CGST/SGST has to be credited and reissued, and if the return has already gone in, amended.
HSN and SAC codes, and how many digits you need
Every line on a tax invoice needs an HSN code for goods or a SAC for services. How many digits depends on your aggregate turnover in the preceding financial year — smaller businesses report fewer digits than larger ones, and B2B and B2C invoices are treated differently.
Because the requirement is tied to turnover and has been tightened in stages, the practical answer is to store the fullest code you can against each product once, and let the software report at the level required. A six-digit code can always be truncated; a two-digit one cannot be expanded.
Billixo keeps the code on the product record and carries it onto every line automatically, and its AI HSN lookup will suggest one from a plain description when you genuinely do not know.
Bill scanning, in practice
The single largest time cost in most small businesses is not raising invoices — it is entering purchases. A photograph of a supplier bill goes in and a structured draft comes out: supplier, GSTIN, line items, rates, tax split and total.
You check it. That is the workflow, and it is deliberate: an extraction you did not read is a liability, not a saving. But checking a filled form takes fifteen seconds and typing one takes three minutes, and that difference compounds over a month of purchases.
A note for accountants and CAs
If you are the person who has to make sense of a client’s billing at the end of the month, what you need from their software is narrow and specific: a complete outward supply summary, correct place-of-supply treatment, HSN present on every line, and an export you can open without repair.
Billixo produces GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries and exports to CSV, Excel and JSON. Client-side, the invoice fields cannot be skipped, which removes the category of problem where the data was never captured in the first place.
The price, plainly
Free is ₹0 and stays ₹0. The paid plans are bought for a fixed term, paid once, with no auto-renewal and no card kept on file — when a term ends the account drops back to Free until you decide to buy again.
There is no per-invoice charge, no per-user surprise on the free plan, and no feature that is technically included but practically throttled. What the plan says you get is what you get.
Compare the plans on the home page, or just start free now and look at the ceiling from the inside.
Reliability, backups and getting your data out
Cloud billing software is only as good as its worst day. Two things matter more than any feature list: that your data is backed up somewhere you can reach, and that you can export it in a format something else can read.
Exports here are CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one, covering customers, products, invoices and payments. That is the honest test of whether software respects you — not what it promises, but what it lets you take when you leave.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work offline?
No. It runs in a browser and needs a connection to issue a bill. If your counter loses internet for long stretches, installed software is the better engineering choice and it is better to know that now.
Will it handle my GST returns?
It prepares and exports GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B figures on the paid plans, and reconciles purchases against GSTR-2B. Filing happens on the government portal — nothing here submits a return on your behalf.
Can I import what I already have?
Yes — customers and items import from a spreadsheet. The advice that saves the most time is to tidy the sheet first: one row per record, no merged cells, GSTINs in their own column.
Are the invoices valid for GST?
Yes. Every invoice carries the fields Rule 46 requires — GSTIN, HSN/SAC on each line, place of supply, the correct CGST/SGST or IGST split, and a consecutive invoice series that restarts each financial year.
Can I move my existing customers and products in?
Yes. Bulk import from CSV or Excel on any paid plan, and export back out in CSV, Excel or JSON at any time, including on Free. Most people bring their party and item lists across in one pass and carry outstanding invoices as opening balances.
See it working on your own bills
The fastest way to judge billing software is to bill with it. Photograph one supplier invoice, raise one sales invoice, and look at the PDF your customer would receive.
Open the software demo → — free account, no card, about a minute to set up.
More details on the home page → — what it does, what it costs, and where the limits are.
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