Head office is billed. The goods go to another plant.

Read the address blocks before the tax rows

The invoice has a supplier address at the top, a bill-to block on the left and a ship-to block on the right. Your plant address is the one you recognise. It is tempting to use it for every field and move on.

I would stop at that temptation. A delivery address answers where the goods went. The billed buyer answers whom the supplier invoiced. Place of supply is a legal determination. Those answers can differ without anyone having sent the goods to the wrong place.

This matters when a head office orders material for a plant, when separately registered units share a purchasing team, or when delivery goes straight to a job worker. The invoice can be perfectly legible and still require someone who knows the purchase arrangement.

The IGST Act, Section 10 distinguishes goods-movement situations, including the bill-to/ship-to provision in Section 10(1)(b). Read the provision and applicable amendments with your tax reviewer. This article organises the evidence; it does not decide every multi-location transaction.

Who told the supplier where to deliver?

Draw the instruction before drawing the lorry route. Suppose, in a fictional arrangement, a Delhi buyer directs a Maharashtra supplier to deliver goods to a Maharashtra job worker. “The truck stayed in Maharashtra” is true. It is not, by itself, the place-of-supply analysis.

For a transaction that meets Section 10(1)(b), the third person directing delivery is deemed to have received the goods, and the provision refers to that person's principal place of business. First establish that this is the provision governing your facts. Do not use the illustration as a blanket instruction to levy a particular tax.

Now change the facts. The plant placed the order in its own registered name, while head office merely pays the supplier centrally. That is not the same arrangement just because the same people approve the payment. Paying a bill does not automatically make the paying office the recipient.

Or perhaps the second location is only an additional place of business under the same registration. Do not invent a separate buyer GSTIN for every plant. Obtain the registration and PO information that actually applies.

The buyer GSTIN on the invoice should be compared with the purchase instruction, not selected by proximity. If the supplier billed the wrong registration, request the appropriate correction through the supplier and tax team. Rewriting the extracted field does not correct the supplier's source document or filing.

The file that settles the question

Keep the invoice together with the relevant PO or instruction and the delivery evidence. The PO tells you who bought the goods and who authorised the destination. The GRN or job-worker acknowledgement tells you where receipt was recorded. The tax reviewer needs both.

Mark the buyer identity explicitly in the file. “Head office purchase” is a loose description. A legal name, relevant GST registration and PO reference make the question answerable. Use the supplier's invoice number exactly as printed so the correction trail can be linked later.

If the invoice prints POS, retain that literal value separately from the destination address. It might be correct. It might be inconsistent with the arrangement. Either way, AP should preserve what was printed while raising the tax question.

If POS is absent, do not copy a state from whichever address is easiest to read. A missing printed field and a legally determinable value are different things. Note the absence and route the determination to the person responsible for it.

The GSTIN-state and POS comparison explains the document-level regime check. It is not a substitute for the underlying statutory analysis. A consistent CGST/SGST or IGST pattern can still be based on the wrong commercial identity.

Movement paperwork helps establish facts, but an e-way bill is not the purchase invoice. Do not move its buyer or state fields into the tax invoice merely to make the documents agree. An inconsistency should be investigated, not hidden by copying.

Give the shared AP desk a repeatable instruction

A purchasing team serving several plants needs a master record of which registration each PO uses. Put the relevant buyer information in the PO itself. Asking AP to recognise the right GSTIN from a company name is an invitation to choose whichever one was used last week.

When goods go to a job worker, identify that destination as a destination. Keep the ownership and processing arrangement documented as well. Our job-work paper trail addresses movement of your own material; do not confuse it with a supplier's sale delivered under a buyer's instruction.

Make supplier corrections precise. Instead of “GST wrong,” send the bill number, the billed registration and the PO evidence showing the intended buyer. Ask the tax team to specify the correction needed. A useful request prevents a supplier from issuing a second equally ambiguous PDF.

Keep the superseded copy. It explains what AP saw when the exception was raised. The corrected document and any related filing action should be traceable to it. Renaming the new PDF “final” is not the whole correction trail.

EntryLedger reads invoice fields and applies the shipped validation checks. It does not geocode addresses, decide statutory place of supply or look up live registration status. An extracted buyer GSTIN that passes checksum is not proof that the supplier invoiced the correct plant.

Exports do not manufacture a missing POS from the buyer state. Some formats can leave it empty; the e-invoice JSON export needs an appropriate source-supported value or explicit human confirmation. That requirement does not turn EntryLedger into a POS adviser.

Tally XML remains a preview, with actual import and GST-report qualification unverified. Confirming a record prepares it for export; it does not establish that the correct company's books received it. That last check belongs at the handoff.

Before your next shared-plant payment run, pull one invoice with different bill-to and ship-to blocks. Ask which PO bought it, not which address looks familiar. The answer should be in the file, not in the clerk's memory.

AP records guide, not personalised tax or legal advice. Official source wording checked on 12 October 2026. Have your CA or responsible adviser apply the effective law to your facts before a statutory payment decision or return adjustment.