16 — Get Paid & Close the Loop (BRC)

The invoice is out, the goods are on the water — now the buyer has to actually pay you, and your bank has to certify that the money landed. That certification is the BRC (Bank Realisation Certificate): the document your bank issues once your export proceeds are received, and the record every export-benefit scheme ultimately checks before it lets you claim what you're owed. This section covers two short, ordinary steps: recording the buyer's payment, and finding + reconciling the BRC record against the eBRC number your bank gives you.

Before you start

• The invoice you're getting paid against is submitted — done in Raise the Export Invoice. Submitting the invoice is also what creates the BRC record you'll reconcile in step 2, so there's nothing to set up here beyond that.
• Have the buyer's remittance details (amount received, date, any bank charges deducted) and the eBRC number your bank issued once the funds cleared.

What happens around payment and the BRC:

flowchart LR
    si["Export Invoice\n(submitted)"] -->|"on submit"| brc["BRC record\ncreated automatically\nStatus: Open"]
    si -->|"Create > Payment"| pe["Payment Entry\nagainst the invoice"]
    pe -->|"you add a row\nwith the eBRC No."| brc2["BRC Payment Details\nStatus: Completed"]

Steps

1. Record the buyer's payment

Payment Entry is the standard place ERPNext records money received — nothing export-specific here.

1. Open the submitted invoice and click Create > Payment. This is the primary route — it opens a new Payment Entry with the Party/Party Name and the Payment References row (the invoice, with its outstanding amount) already filled in for you.

2. Confirm the basics: Payment Type is Receive, Company, and under Payment From / To the Party and Party Name are the buyer.

   

3. Scroll to Amount and enter the Paid Amount — what actually landed, in your company's currency.

4. In the Payment References table, the invoice row shows its Outstanding amount — allocate the payment against it (for a full payment, the outstanding drops to zero once you save).

   

5. Save, then Submit the Payment Entry.

How you know it worked: the invoice's status pill flips to Paid.

A Paid invoice only means the money is booked in your accounts — it doesn't yet tell your bank, or any export-benefit scheme, that the proceeds were realised in foreign exchange. That's what the BRC record is for.

2. Find and reconcile the BRC record for this invoice

Submitting the invoice in the previous section already created a BRC Management record for it, sitting at status Open. You don't create this yourself — go to it from the invoice's Connections tab, or open BRC Management in the sidebar and search by Sales Invoice No.

At the top it already carries the invoice's identity — nothing to fill in here:

Below that, the Shipping Bill Details table is also pre-filled from the shipment — this is what ties the foreign-exchange realisation back to the specific export it paid for:

Now reconcile the payment against your bank's eBRC number — this is the one step you actually do on this record.

1. Scroll to Payment Details. Click Add Row.

2. Set Voucher Type to Payment Entry and Voucher No. to the Payment Entry you submitted in step 1 — its Amount and Amount INR fill in for you.

3. Enter the BRC No. (the eBRC number from your bank), the BRC Date, the BRC Amount it certifies, and any Bank Charges the bank deducted.

   

4. Save. The row collapses back into the Payment Details table alongside the running totals:

   

How you know it worked: once the BRC amounts you've recorded cover the full invoice amount, the record's Status field (not the pill in the header — see the note below) turns to Completed. You can see this in the Report View of the BRC Management list:

If the buyer paid in instalments, add one payment row per instalment; the status reads Partially BRC Generated until the recorded BRC amounts add up to the full invoice amount.

Don't be thrown by the header pill. The BRC record's own Status field (Open / Partially BRC Generated / Completed) is what actually tracks realisation — it's what you just watched turn to Completed. But the document header next to the record's name can still show a Draft pill:

That pill reflects a separate thing — whether the document itself has been formally submitted — and is independent of the Status field. Go by the Status field (or the Report View column) to know whether the export is realised; only submit the BRC document itself if your process requires a locked, unamendable record.

What "Completed" means

Once a BRC record reaches Completed, you've proven — in the eyes of your bank and of every export-benefit scheme downstream — that this shipment's foreign-exchange proceeds actually came home. That's the trigger the next section relies on: Claim Your Export Benefits pulls in accrued Duty Drawback and RODTEP entries and settles them, and a realised BRC is exactly what a scheme audit will ask you to show.