Numaligarh refinery becomes first oil PSU to achieve 100% e-invoicing

Assam-based Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) has become the first public sector oil company in India to completely do away with manually signed hard-copy invoices and replacing them with digitally signed ones. 

According to the company, which is a subsidiary of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, this environment friendly initiative which would replace manually signed hard-copy invoices issued on pre-printed stationery in multiple copies, would help save paper and end non-essential printing. “On a conservative count, considering NRL’s sales volume of Rs 11,000 crore annually, electronic invoicing process and digitally signing and storing will reduce printing of approximately 6,95,000 pages annually, equivalent to 4.3 tonnes of paper, resulting in saving of approximately 103 numbers of trees per year,” said a company press release. 

The company said this e-invoicing initiative was part of the central government’s vision of a ‘Digital India’. With introducing digitally signed invoices for its product sales transactions taking place from its Siliguri marketing terminal in West Bengal, the company achieved this feat. Earlier in June 2016, the company implemented digitally signed invoicing at its marketing terminal in Numaligarh.  

NRL customers will now be able to access and download required information from the electronically stored database which would also be available to central excise and tax department.