E-Way Bill Part A vs Part B: Who Fills What

Part A of an e-way bill carries the paperwork — who is supplying, who is receiving, what the invoice says, what the goods are worth. Part B carries the vehicle. The registered person causing the movement normally fills Part A; whoever actually controls the conveyance fills Part B, which is often the transporter rather than the supplier. That split matters for one practical reason above all others: the e-way bill is not valid for movement, and its validity clock does not start, until Part B is in.

Why Form EWB-01 is split in two

The e-way bill is one form, EWB-01, but it is filled by two different kinds of party at two different moments. The commercial facts about a consignment — who sold what to whom, under which invoice, for how much — are known the moment the invoice is raised, and they are known by the supplier's accounts team. The physical facts — which truck, which driver, which lorry receipt number — are often not known until the goods are on the loading bay, and they are known by the transport desk or by a third-party transporter who has no access to the supplier's billing system.

Splitting the form lets each side furnish what it actually knows, when it knows it. It also means the two halves behave completely differently once submitted. Part A freezes on generation and cannot be amended. Part B is designed to be updated repeatedly through the journey, because vehicles change and journeys get re-routed. If you only remember one thing about the structure, remember that asymmetry: get Part A wrong and you cancel and start again; get Part B wrong and you simply update it.

Part A, field by field

Part A of EWB-01 runs from A.1 to A.9. Every field is a statement about the consignment or the document behind it, and none of them is about the vehicle.

Two of these are worth extra care. The place of dispatch and place of delivery PIN codes are what the portal uses to compute the road distance, and that distance decides how many days of validity you get — putting the head-office PIN instead of the warehouse PIN can quietly cost you a day. And the reason for transportation is not cosmetic: choosing "supply" for a stock transfer, or "job work" for a genuine sale, produces a record that contradicts your returns.

The GSTIN fields deserve the same discipline. A GSTIN typed into Part A is baked into a government record that travels with the goods and is later matched against your outward supplies. If you are not certain the counterparty's registration is live, our guides to the structure of a GSTIN and how to spot a fake GST number cover the checks worth doing before, not after, the truck leaves. The HSN you enter here should match the one on the invoice — see HSN codes explained if your item master is inconsistent about digit length.

Part B, field by field

Part B is short. It asks how the goods are moving and nothing else:

• B.1 — Vehicle number for road. The registration number of the conveyance carrying the goods, in one of the formats the portal accepts (covered below). Defence, temporary-registration and Nepal or Bhutan registered vehicles have their own prefixes.
• B.2 — Transport document number and date. The goods receipt number for road consignments handled by a transporter, or the railway receipt number, airway bill number or bill of lading number for rail, air and vessel movement respectively.

Alongside these, the generation screen asks for the mode of transport (road, rail, air or ship, with ship also covering ship-cum-road and ship-cum-rail multimodal legs) and the vehicle type — regular or over-dimensional cargo. Vehicle type is not a label; it selects which validity slab applies, and over-dimensional cargo runs on a far tighter clock than regular cargo.

For rail, air and vessel movement, Part A is furnished by the registered supplier or recipient and the e-way bill is completed by furnishing the transport document number in Part B. In the rail case there is a further practical wrinkle: railways will not deliver the goods unless the e-way bill is produced at delivery, even though the railways themselves are not required to carry the bill during the journey. The invoice or delivery challan still has to accompany the consignment in every mode.

Who fills Part A and who fills Part B

The obligation to generate the e-way bill sits with the registered person who causes the movement — usually the consignor, or the consignee where the consignee arranges transport. That person furnishes Part A. Part B follows the vehicle, which is where most of the confusion in practice comes from.

A transporter who is not registered under GST cannot be assigned a bill without an identifier, which is what enrolment on the e-way bill portal solves: an enrolled transporter gets a 15-digit Transporter ID that the supplier enters in place of a GSTIN when assigning the bill. Once a transporter has been assigned and has updated Part B, the consignor cannot swap in a different transporter for that bill — so get the Transporter ID right at generation.

Two related points that trip up accounts teams. First, assigning a Transporter ID in Part A does not transfer the legal responsibility for having a valid e-way bill; it transfers the practical ability to fill in Part B. Second, if your customer's truck arrives at your gate on ex-works terms, the movement is theirs to document — worth writing into the contract, because "we assumed they had generated it" is not a defence at a check post. Our overview of e-way bill rules, limits and exemptions covers the threshold and exemption side of that question.

Part A slips and the 15-day window

You can furnish Part A on its own without knowing the vehicle. Doing so generates a unique Part A slip — a reference number that holds the consignment data and stays open for 15 days for Part B to be added. Beyond that window it lapses and the details have to be entered again.

This is genuinely useful for despatch planning: the billing team can raise Part A the moment the invoice is cut, and the transport desk completes Part B when the vehicle is allotted. What it is not is authorisation to move goods. A Part A slip alone does not make the consignment compliant, and a check post will treat it as movement without an e-way bill.

There is one carve-out. Where goods move within the same state for up to 50 km from the consignor's place of business to the transporter's place of business for onward transportation, conveyance details need not be furnished in Part B for that leg. The same relaxation applies in reverse on the last leg — up to 50 km within the state from the transporter's premises to the consignee. Both are intended for short shuttle movements to and from a transport hub, not as a general exemption, and the distance is measured within one state only.

The validity clock starts at Part B

The validity period of an e-way bill runs from the time the first entry is made in Part B. Not from the invoice date, not from when Part A was furnished, and not from when the vehicle physically starts moving. That is why a Part A slip can sit open for a fortnight without costing you anything: the clock has not started.

The corollary is the one that catches people out. If Part B is filled in at the point the vehicle is allotted but the truck then sits in the yard overnight waiting for a driver, those hours come out of your validity. Because each day of validity expires at midnight of the following day rather than after a full 24 hours, a Part B entry made late in the evening can leave you with very little usable time. The arithmetic, the distance slabs and the eight-hour extension window are all worked through in our companion piece on e-way bill validity and the distance rule.

Vehicle number format rules

The portal validates the vehicle number you type into Part B against a fixed set of patterns, and a registration number that does not match one of them is simply rejected. Enter it without spaces, dashes or other separators.

Two things follow from this. First, if a valid registration number is being rejected, the problem is almost always formatting — a space, a hyphen, the letter O typed where a zero belongs, or a temporary registration entered without the TM prefix. Second, a digit slip in the vehicle number is a Part B error, not a Part A error, so it can be corrected by updating Part B rather than cancelling the bill. CBIC has also directed that minor, genuinely clerical discrepancies of one or two digits in a vehicle number should be treated as minor rather than as movement without a valid bill; if you are relying on that in a dispute, check the current text of the relevant circular on cbic-gst.gov.in rather than a secondary summary.

Multi-leg transport and Part B updates

Long-haul consignments rarely stay in one vehicle. Where goods are transferred from one conveyance to another in the course of transit, the transporter — or the consignor or recipient, whoever is handling it — must update the conveyance details in Part B before the further movement begins. Not at the end of the day, not on arrival.

Part B can be updated as many times as the journey requires. Each update replaces the current conveyance details on the same e-way bill number, so the bill accumulates a trail of the vehicles that carried the consignment. Practical cases where an update is needed:

• Transhipment at a hub — goods move from a line-haul truck to a local delivery vehicle.
• Breakdown or accident — the consignment is shifted to a replacement vehicle.
• Mode change — a road leg followed by a rail or ship leg, where the transport document number for the new mode goes into Part B.
• Splitting a consignment across vehicles — where one invoice is carried onward in several vehicles from a transhipment point, the portal's multi-vehicle option lets you record each of them against the same bill.

What updating Part B does not do is buy you more time. Validity is fixed by the first Part B entry and the distance declared at generation, and a mid-transit vehicle change neither resets nor extends it. If the journey is going to overrun, the extension route is separate and narrow — available only from eight hours before expiry to eight hours after, on stating the consignment's current location and the reason for the delay.

One last distinction worth being clear on: a consolidated e-way bill (Form EWB-02), which a transporter generates to carry several consignments in one vehicle, does not substitute for Part B on the individual bills. Each underlying e-way bill still needs its own conveyance details. The consolidated bill is a convenience document for the driver, not a replacement for the Part B obligation on each consignment.

Frequently asked questions