If you've heard other business owners mention "IRN" or seen a QR code appear on an invoice from a larger supplier, that's e-invoicing. It sounds like a bigger change than it actually is in practice - here's what it means and whether it applies to you.
E-invoicing doesn't mean creating your invoice on a computer instead of paper - most businesses already do that. It specifically means reporting the invoice's details to the government's Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) before or as you issue it, which then returns two things: an Invoice Reference Number (IRN) and a QR code, both of which get added to the invoice you give your customer.
E-invoicing applies based on your business's aggregate turnover in a financial year, with the threshold having been lowered progressively over time to cover more businesses. Below the applicable threshold, you continue invoicing exactly as before - nothing changes. This is why the threshold is worth checking directly on the official portal rather than assuming either way, since it has moved more than once.
Once an invoice has been registered and has its IRN, it generally can't be silently edited afterward - corrections go through a formal cancellation and reissue process instead, which is worth knowing before you get used to the flow.
In practice, e-invoicing isn't a separate system you operate alongside your regular billing - it's a step that happens as part of it. You create the invoice as normal; if e-invoicing applies to you, that invoice is submitted for registration, and the IRN and QR code come back and get added before the invoice reaches your customer. The manual, error-prone version of this would be re-typing invoice details into a government portal for every single sale - which is exactly the part worth automating rather than doing by hand.
Invoice2Track supports GST e-invoicing directly - once enabled and connected to your GST Suspense Provider, the IRN and QR code are handled automatically as part of creating the invoice. See how it works →