Cygnet Invoice Registration Portal on Amazon Web Services Enables Taxpayers to Seamlessly Generate e-Invoicing

By Rajesh Khunt, VP, Technology and Engineering – Cygnet Infotech
By Sanjeev Kumar, Sr. Solutions Architect – Amazon Web Services India

Cygnet Infotech

The introduction of GST, known as the Goods and Services Tax in India, was a landmark tax reform through which several central and state-level taxes were subsumed into a single levy across the country.

With this, there was a need for businesses to digitize their tax processes to automate reporting and reconciliation of data at the transaction level. The government gradually increased the scope of the compliances, introducing e-way bills in 2018 and e-invoicing in a phased manner starting in 2020.

Historically, the automation of business processes and tax reporting has evolved somewhat independently, or in the worst cases have remained as isolated processes with data staying in silos. The overlap between these functions is increasing with tax authorities demanding more transparency and real-time access to information.

The introduction of e-invoicing in India was one such instance where businesses were required to streamline their processes to generate e-invoices in real time.

In this post, we will highlight the importance of eInvoice Registration Portal in the GST ecosystem and how Cygnet Infotech has quickly built scalable, resilient, and secure IRP application leveraging Amazon Web Services managed services.

Cygnet Infotech is an Amazon Web Services Select Tier Services Partner that delivers value and sustainability to ever-changing business environments with emerging technology trends and business models.

GSTN eInvoice Registration Portal

As the government in India is gradually introducing e-invoicing to companies with a lower turnover, thus reducing the e-invoicing threshold, the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) has empaneled few private players as invoice registration portals to allow e-invoice generation and registration through their own IRPs.

The ability to process enormous amounts of data in real time and interconnect with systems makes these private players well-positioned to use data analytics to augment the traditional forms of business processes and finance, target niche markets, and orient their products to maximize consumer satisfaction.

However, tech doesn’t have to mean expensive. It’s essential companies look at the digitization journey not as a compliance burden but to bring direct benefits to businesses and their ecosystems. The interconnected systems and services that enable the GST ecosystem are also increasing the tolerance for switching costs and decreasing the tolerance for solutions that are not adding value to users.

Cygnet IRP Application

Cygnet Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) enables business to generate e-invoices reducing overall turnaround time and authenticate the generated invoices by allotting Invoice Reference Numbers (IRN) and QR codes to each invoice or CDN (credit or debit note).

The Cygnet Infotech team undertook highly aggressive timelines to build and launch the Cygnet IRP platform. They focused on building the right foundation for governing a complex IRP platform and were presented with challenges of procuring on-premises hardware and software on time, meeting uptime availability service-level agreements (SLAs), achieving elasticity and scalability, planning business continuity, and setting up a disaster recovery.

The primary goal of Cygnet IRP was to create a modern and robust system capable of efficiently handling large-scale transactions and data without compromising performance. Additionally, the aim was to establish a secure and dependable connection with government backbone systems to ensure compliance and monitoring.

Cygnet Infotech chose Amazon Web Services for hosting its Cygnet IRP platform. This led to several benefits including faster launch times, decreased infrastructure and software management burdens, enhanced reliability and resilience for the platform, better oversight through cloud monitoring and metrics, and strengthened security through cloud-native Amazon Web Services security services .

The Cygnet IRP platform runs on cloud services including Amazon RDS for PostgresSQL for databases, Amazon OpenSearch Service for search functionality, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for computing resources.

It utilizes Amazon Route 53 for domain management, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for block storage, Amazon Elastic File Service (Amazon EFS) for file storage, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage. The platform uses Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring, along with S3 for log storage and Amazon OpenSearch Service for visualization.

The platform’s security is ensured through Amazon Web Services-native security tools: Amazon Web Services WAF for web application firewall, Amazon Web Services Security Hub for centralized security management, Amazon Web Services Config for resource tracking, and Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection.

Figure 1 – Cygnet IRP High Level Architecture.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services Cloud and Managed Services

The Amazon Web Services cloud empowers the Cygnet application with agility, elasticity, and scalability. Within this environment, Amazon Web Services hosts a self-healing and stateless application that proactively addresses errors through automated processes.

Using Amazon Web Services’s Active-Active distributed resilient infrastructure, Amazon Route 53 automatically directs 100% of traffic to the surviving site when it detects a failure of the application in the primary region. Amazon Web Services helped Cygnet IRP secure its database, making it highly available and durable with synchronous data replication across multiple Availability Zones.

Leveraging Application Load Balancer and health checks, the Cygnet application self-heals from failures, thereby safeguarding the customer experience.

Amazon Web Services also enables the Cygnet IRP platform to scale up and down instantly to accommodate spikes in infrastructure, which may occur due to sudden increases in e-invoice traffic across a wide range of customer turnovers.

Amazon Web Services auto scaling promptly orchestrates relaunches and seamless reintegration into the cluster. This approach has allowed the Cygnet team to ensure uninterrupted service for end users and lay a robust foundation for Cygnet IRP. The foundational principle of compute instance statelessness underpins this design methodology.

Lastly, Amazon Web Services benefits the end consumers of Cygnet IRP with higher performance, a higher uptime, and uninterrupted services. Cygnet customers already on the Amazon Web Services platform will experience low latency beyond the basic e-invoicing compliance services that Cygnet IRP offers.

Conclusion

Cygnet IRP helps businesses generate e-invoices at speed and offers multiple options to taxpayers, making it easy for them to sign up for e-invoice registration and generation.

Cygnet IRP offers E-Invoicing Portal, E-Invoicing Tool, API access enabling multiple API offerings for tailor-made compliance requirements, IRP Mobile App to automate e-invoicing, and e-Way Bill generation on the go for corporates, chartered accountants, and partners.

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Cygnet Infotech is an Amazon Web Services Partner that delivers value and sustainability to ever-changing business environments with emerging technology trends and business models.

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