What is the Invoice Management System (IMS)?

Accept, reject or keep pending each invoice your supplier reports about you.

Last checked 20 September 2026

The Invoice Management System (IMS) is a facility on the GST portal, live since October 2024, where you act on each invoice your suppliers have reported against you — accept it, reject it, or leave it pending. What you accept flows into your GSTR-2B and becomes your claimable credit.

What changed

Before IMS, GSTR-2B simply appeared and you reconciled against it afterwards. With IMS, you act on invoices before the statement is drawn. Reconciliation moves from being something you do to a statement to something you do to build it.

The three actions

Action	Effect	Use it when
Accept	The invoice flows into your GSTR-2B and the credit becomes available	It matches a bill you actually received
Reject	It does not flow into your 2B; no credit	It is not yours, or it is plainly wrong
Pending	Held over — not in this period’s 2B, carried forward for a later decision	You are still checking, or the goods have not arrived

No action is not a neutral choice

An invoice you never look at is treated as deemed accepted and flows into your 2B. Doing nothing is therefore a decision to accept everything your suppliers reported about you — including their mistakes.

What it means day to day

You need your own purchase record to act against. Accepting or rejecting an invoice means comparing it with what you actually received. If your books are behind, you cannot act on anything.
Timing matters more. Pending carries forward, but not indefinitely, and a decision put off is a decision that gets made by default.
Credit notes need acting on too. Rejecting a supplier’s credit note has consequences for their liability, so it is not a free action — see credit notes and debit notes.
Supplier relationships get more concrete. "I have kept your invoice pending" is a much more specific conversation than "there is a mismatch".

Where this is heading

The stated direction of travel is tighter linkage between what is reported, what is accepted and what can be claimed — including hard-locking the credit figures in GSTR-3B so they cannot be edited away from the statement, and making IMS action mandatory rather than optional. Changes have been announced with effective dates during 2026.

Confirm the dates before you plan around them

Implementation dates for these changes have moved before. Get the current position from your accountant rather than from any article, this one included. What is not in doubt is the direction: less room to claim credit that does not match what your suppliers reported.

How to get ready

1
Record every purchase bill as it arrives, with the supplier’s invoice number exactly as printed.
2
Make acting in IMS a scheduled monthly task with a named owner, not something that happens if there is time.
3
Deal with a doubtful invoice while it is recent, when the supplier still remembers it.
4
Keep a record of what you rejected and why. You will be asked.

Can I change my mind after accepting?

Actions can generally be revised until the relevant statement is generated for the period. After that, corrections move into the ordinary amendment route.

What if I reject a genuine invoice by mistake?

It does not reach your 2B for that period and your supplier sees the rejection, with consequences at their end. Reject deliberately, not to clear a queue.

Does this replace reconciliation?

No — it relocates it. You still need your own purchase record, because that is what you compare against in order to act at all.

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