CLEAR'S JOURNEY TO eaeeaeveaee CONQUER E-INVOICING neo ind’ biggest compliance changes in recent times For most Indians, 1st October 2020 was HOW CLEAR BUILT AN ENTERPRISE-GRADE PRODUCT WITH COMPLEX INTEGRATIONS AND WORLD-CLASS PERFORMANCE FOR ONE OF INDIA’S BIGGEST COMPLIANCE CHANGES IN RECENT TIMES For most Indians. sst October 2020 was an ordinaty day: the country in partial lockciown, people working from home, vaccination stilla while away and the economy fighting to stay afloat. For a small team of passionate techies at Clear, the midnight of October 1 was indoed extraordinary Because its the day we built and launched the software that would power one of India’s biggest compliance transformations, For the uninitiated, e-invoicing is the law that mandates every B2B invoice to be electronically authenticated by the GST Network (GSN) in real-time. This means that businesses need to upload their invoices, have them validated and e-way bill generated — entirely electronically — before the {goods can leave the warehouse! ‘This is unprecedented in compliance law for two reasons. Compliance is almost always a consequence that happens post-facto, not a hindrance to conducting the business itself For instance, if you make a wrong entry, you can stil sel the product and adjust/pay a fine later. That's ‘not possible with e-invoicing. In fact, without proper authentication, you cant even get the product to the market E-invoicing makes compliance a prerequisite. Moreover. it necessitates complete digitisation. Businesses can no longer scribble on sheets of paper and fix the books later. They need to submit accurate information across hundreds of felds in advance. This is @ paradigm shift in not just compliance, but also business operations itselt. ‘Tobe fair, e-invoicing has been a long-time coming, For years, there have been whispers in all comers, For years. there have also been false starts and postponements. Add to it the global pandemic, few exacted the e-invoicing law to actually come into force. sobncnbe aTimeline & Applicability Taxpayers having annual aggregate turnover* Go) co Gu) kena SPeeateny cal 2020 Eval 2021 (Genet) (Grete) (mandatory) But this time, the government was determined, t announced the first phase, making it mandatory for taxpayers with a turnover of Rs. 500° crore to follow e-invoicing. Soon, this would become the norm for every business, Overnight. every business would need to equip themselves with advanced technology — with complex integrations and real-time processing capability — to just who did everything on paper ledgers would need to go digital. The somewhat tech-savvy business that ran everything on spreadsheets or non-standard custom keep the lights on. The tech un-sawvy small and medium enterprises (S -ware would need more horsepower. In fact. even enterprises that use expensive ERP systems need to update To embrace e-invoicing successfully, busine nly one thing: Rot t purpose-built technology. We, at Clear, began building it WHAT IT TAKES TO BUILD COMPLEX COMPLIANCE TECH Our journey, however, began long before 01 October 2020. I's templing to say that we started almost 10 years ago, when we began with the mission to “make it easy for Indians to file their taxes, every year’ But our e-invoicing journey started a litle later. In2019, when the news around e-invoicing was in the air, Clear sot up a small team of product, ‘owners, chartered accountants and developers. We did extensive research — met the officals at re to understand the landscape. We spoke to enterprises, who were already T solution to g sense of the markel. We experimented with the APIs 2athat the government opened up. We put together a pilot and took it to the market for validation, We demo-ed it to CFOs and business lea 3 We collected feed 1ck Our agile and dynamic development teams optimised the product, gelting it ready for launch. AT 12 AM ON THE FIRST OF OCTOBER 2020, WITH 700+ INTEGRATIONS ACROSS DOZENS OF THIRD-PARTY ECOSYSTEMS, VARIOUS ERPS AND GOVERNMENT APIS, WE TOOK GLEARTAX E-INVOICING LIVE, Inretrospect. building our e-invoicing product was an endeavour untke any other. In the middle of to our product but they were also ‘acquainted with the e-invoicing law itself. In essence, we were bullding a boat to carry ging pandemic, our customers were not only getting us gettin someone who is seeing the sea for the first time. So, we got all hands on deck to ensure an impeccably smooth transition for our customers. + Ourcontent teams wrote white-papers and explainers about the law + Ourchartered accountants worked closely with their customers to answer ‘questions ina timely manner + Ourproduct teams set up a virtual customer support desk — an open Zoom call where anyone could join and get help + We set up WhatsApp groups (the only platform they were comfortable on) for 100s of customers to walk them through e-invoicing adoption Inparallel, our engineering teams began working on improving the product and strengthening it for scale, We reimagined the user experience to make sure that every customer can perform every lask they need — from registration to filing — right from within the ClearTax e-invoicing app. We upgraded the tech stack too for lightning-fast performance, \We achioved allthis with no disruation to the customer at all, ClearTax e-invoicing 20 was completely backward compatible. No one was re- their feet and replaced it with a new one, no one faced any trouble ard, While we pulled the boat from under ‘S mlisoconss response | 5000+1RNs par minute | 1 kh eswoicoioonay bis tine atatme 200,000 document 98.2% PO funconaty | 56.8 customer NPS score ‘sownloadsn one go success ate The e-invoicing product is an important milestone in Clear's journey, While we began as a customer lax fling company, our GST solution established us as a strong 828 fintech player. The e-invoicing product goes one step further to 500 companies, trust us today. We are processing about 10 per cent of Indiais B2B invoices, with over $300 billion trade value rengthen our position, Over 3.500 cu mers, including FortuneWHAT'S IN STORE AHEAD FOR CLEAR Not just that. while building e-invoicing. we also transformed ourselves into a fundamentally more. agile, product-driven technology company. We performed architecture reviews more carefully. We evaluated performance-cost trade-offs more comprehensively. We set up processes for how systems need to be built. We brought together enough resources te build anything that's used by mote than one team, accelerating reusability: We recreated the platform team, We also set for ourselves high standards for engineering KPIs and aligned them clearly to business goals. This improved our quality standards. Today. even if there is a P4 bug, the product doesnt go into production. This empowered our QA and CA teams to contribute proactively to the product. For the first time in the history of Clear, we completely sunset the first version of our e-invoicing product, migrating every single customer to the new and improved version. ‘As a software product and as a technology company, ¢-invoicing takes us one step further in our mmission of building Indias largest B28 business network to solve for use cases across procurement, invoicing, payments, collections and more. E-invoicing will alse power our global ambitions, catapulting us to the next level in our journey. Bewae a ‘ < previous post Next post > THE ERA OF ALTERNATIVE LENDING ON BDD TESTING DIALECTS LEAR aLoG © 2028, fo 4a