Since 1 August 2026, e-Way Bills for registered recipients need to carry the Ship-to GSTIN, not just the buyer’s GSTIN, and unregistered recipients are entered as URP. The GST Network also added two checks alongside this: the State Code has to match the PIN code on the shipping address, and a shipment can no longer list the same GSTIN as both the billing party and the shipping party. A new option to voluntarily close an e-Way Bill after delivery went live at the same time.
Businesses that hadn’t updated their ERP and API integrations before the deadline are the ones who felt it first, with e-Way Bills bouncing back for correction instead of clearing. If your ERP has been generating clean e-Way Bills through August, this particular change is already behind you.
It’s a good moment to look at what usually sits just behind the e-Way Bill on a plant floor: the GRN.
The timing gap most plants live with
A vendor typically raises an invoice within a day of dispatch. Quality checks at the receiving end usually take somewhere between 7 and 15 days. In between, the invoice sits in an exception queue waiting for the GRN to close. When a purchase order arrives in more than one lot, which is common, each lot gets its own GRN while the vendor may have invoiced the full quantity upfront, so the quantities don’t line up until every lot is in. Material placed on quality hold can’t be matched at all until the hold clears, and that can take anywhere from a day for routine items to over a month for critical components. If a defect turns up after the material has already been accepted, it adds a reversal GRN, a debit note, and sometimes a fresh delivery challan, each one its own reconciliation thread to keep in sync.
None of this is unusual. It’s simply how GRN reconciliation works in most plants running SAP or another ERP without a dedicated matching layer sitting on top. What varies a lot from plant to plant is how much of it stays stuck. Where reconciliation is done manually, through spreadsheets or native ERP reports, it’s common to see 12 to 25 percent of open GRNs still sitting in stale status at month-end. Where that matching runs on its own, that figure drops to under 3 percent within about 90 days, and the overall match rate moves from roughly 51 to 88 percent.
Reconciled by hand
12–25%
of GRNs still stuck at month-end
7–15 day QC gap between invoice and GRN
Reconciled automatically
<3%
stuck within 90 days
Match rate moves from 51% to 88%
What changes when GRN matching runs on its own.
Getting this off your plate
The GST update is a good example of how much of this work is really about timing across systems, invoice dates, QC completion dates, and SAP entries that don’t line up on their own and need someone watching the gap. For most plant and finance teams, that watching is hours that could go into the actual manufacturing work in front of them.
“It’s simply how GRN reconciliation works in most plants running SAP or another ERP without a dedicated matching layer sitting on top.”
— Santhosh Pande
This is the kind of process work our team at Letitbex AI spends its time on, so yours doesn’t have to. If challan, PO or GRN matching against SAP is taking up more time than it should, we’re glad to walk through how it runs today. No pitch, just a conversation about where it’s actually getting stuck. Reach out to our team and we’ll set up a short call.