I sold a physical and a digital item in one order. How do I report it?

Why does one order become two exports?

Because the two regimes are triggered by different events, and only one of those events happened to the digital line.

The goods regime is triggered by physical movement. Something leaves India, so it is presented to Customs and declared. That declaration is the origin of everything downstream on the goods side: it becomes a shipping bill or a bill of export, that instrument carries a declared value, and that value enters the Export Data Processing and Monitoring System as an amount awaiting realisation. The entry stays open until inward remittances your AD bank has allocated against it account for the declared value.

The digital line triggers none of this. No package is presented, no frontier is crossed, no declaration is made, and so no shipping bill exists. This is not an oversight in the system or a filing you have forgotten. There is no Customs event to declare, and there never will be for that line. It is an export, and it may well be a zero-rated one, but it is an export of a different kind, recorded in different places.

What makes this a problem rather than a curiosity is that the commercial layer refuses to respect the division. The buyer places one order. You raise one invoice. The platform runs one charge and settles one payout. Every artefact the transaction naturally produces spans both lines, and every regulatory record that will later be reconciled holds only one of them.

Which systems see the goods line, and which never will?

Mapping this once, before you file anything, is most of the work. The table below is structural: it describes which record each system is built to hold, not what any current rule requires.

Read the last row against the six above it. Three artefacts span both lines and every regulatory record holds one. That asymmetry is the whole of the problem, and it is why the reconciliation has to start from a line-item view rather than from the order.

Note the fourth row in particular, because it is the one most often got wrong, and got wrong in the direction that sounds cautious. The digital line is not invisible to your bank. It is money arriving from abroad like any other credit. What it lacks is a shipping bill for a realisation record to be allocated against. That is a narrower statement than the one people reach for, which is that the digital half simply vanishes from every system at once, and the narrower one is the one that holds. Whether and how a services realisation is carried through the e-BRC system is a separate question that this guide does not answer; take it from the e-BRC page below and from your AD bank. For how the goods-side chain runs end to end, see how EDPMS reporting works and e-BRC filing .

Where exactly do I make the split?

On the commercial invoice, before anything is filed, and once.

The invoice is the only document that sits upstream of every system that will later be reconciled against the others. The Customs declaration is prepared from it. The GST return figures derive from it. The payout is matched back to it. Your bank reads it when it asks what a credit relates to. Split there, and every system downstream inherits the same two numbers by construction rather than by coincidence.

Split later instead (separately, in each system, from memory or from a fresh look at the order) and the figures drift apart. Nothing announces the drift. It surfaces as a reconciliation break months afterwards, at which point the question is not what the correct split was but which of four recorded splits you are now going to have to defend.

Only those lines belong in the goods value. This is a physical test, not a commercial one. It does not matter which line the buyer considered the main purchase. </>), }, , , , ]} conclusion= />

The bundled-price case in step two is the one that causes real difficulty, and it is worth being honest about why. When a basket is sold for one price with no per-line breakdown, there is no observation that recovers the split. Only a method. Choose a method you can state in a sentence, apply it consistently across orders, and record it. A consistent basis you can explain is defensible in a way that four different ad-hoc splits are not, and consistency is the thing an examiner can actually check. For what an export invoice should carry, see export invoice fields and terms .

What if I declare the whole order on the shipping bill?

This is the default mistake, because it is the one that makes the paperwork look tidiest at the moment you do it. One order, one value, one bill. Nothing rejects it. The declaration is accepted and the consignment goes.

What you have actually done is declare that goods of the whole order's value left India, when goods of a smaller value did. That single overstatement then propagates into three separate places, none of which will tell you about it at the time.

• The EDPMS entry is permanently unfillable. The bill carries the inflated value, so realisation is measured against it. The goods proceeds cannot reach that figure, because part of what you declared was never proceeds of goods. The entry reads short for as long as it is open, and the only way to close it is to allocate money that is not proceeds of the exported goods against it.
• Any goods-side incentive sits on a base you cannot evidence. Incentives on the goods side accrue on the goods value. Compute one on the inflated figure and the accrual includes revenue that was never an export of goods. And when the claim is examined, the invoice that supports the value shows a digital line inside it.
• The GST position becomes internally inconsistent. The export-of-goods figure in your returns is expected to tie to the shipping bill value. If the declared value contains a digital line, either the return matches the bill and misstates the goods supply, or it states the goods supply correctly and no longer matches the bill.

What if I treat the whole order as a service?

This is the rarer error and the more serious one, and it usually arrives by a plausible route: the digital line is the substance of what was sold, the physical item is incidental to it, and treating the whole thing as a service matches how the business thinks about its own product.

The difficulty is that the goods regime is not triggered by what the transaction is about. It is triggered by physical movement. If something was packed and shipped out of India, that movement is a Customs event whatever the commercial substance of the sale, and treating the order as wholly a service means goods left the country without the declaration that movement requires.

The downstream shape is the mirror image of section 4, and rather less comfortable. There is no shipping bill, so there is no EDPMS entry. Which looks clean, because a record that does not exist cannot read as short. Nothing is flagged. But the absence is the defect: goods moved and no declaration records it, and any goods-side incentive that movement might have supported is unclaimable because the instrument it would be claimed on was never created.

Whether the digital half of a genuinely bundled sale is best characterised as a composite supply or a mixed supply is a separate GST question, and one this guide does not answer. It affects the treatment of that half. It does not affect whether the physical half had to be declared. That is settled by the movement. See GST on export of services for the services-side tests.

How do I apportion the fees and the refunds?

To the line they belong to, before either side is tied out. A platform deducts against the basket, so the deductions arrive undifferentiated even when the sale was not.

Most deductions are directly attributable once you look at the line-item statement rather than the summary. A referral or commission fee is usually charged per line and can simply be assigned. A fulfilment, pick-and-pack or shipping charge attaches to the physical line by its nature. Nothing was fulfilled for the digital one. A payment processing fee is charged on the whole captured amount and is the one genuinely shared deduction, apportioned on the same basis as the split itself. A refund returns to whichever line was refunded, which the statement names.

An exporter sells a basket containing one physical item and one digital item for a single price. The platform settles the order inside a payout that also contains several goods-only orders. All figures below are invented and are there to show the shape of the working, not to state any amount, rate or fee level. </> } result= >

1. Start from the invoice split, not the payout. The invoice already subtotals the goods lines and the digital lines. Those two subtotals are the basis for everything below, and they do not change because a fee was later deducted.
2. Assign the directly attributable deductions. Fulfilment and shipping charges go wholly to the goods subtotal. Per-line commission goes to the line named in the statement. Neither is apportioned, because the statement already says which line incurred it.
3. Apportion the shared deduction only. The payment processing charge was levied on the whole captured amount, so it is split on the same basis the invoice used. Using a different basis here than on the invoice is what makes the two halves stop summing to the payout.
4. Net any refund against its own line. A refunded digital line reduces the digital subtotal and leaves the goods subtotal untouched, even though the credit note reaches you inside the same payout as unrelated goods orders.
5. Tie each side out separately. The goods figure goes against the shipping bill for that consignment. The digital figure is reconciled as services. The two should sum back to the credit for that order, and if they do not, the gap is a deduction you have not yet assigned. Not a realisation shortfall.

The last step is the one worth internalising, because it converts a frightening finding into a bookkeeping one. When the two sides do not sum back to the credit, the first hypothesis is always an unassigned deduction, not missing money. For the goods-only version of this arithmetic (one payout across several bills, with the fee chain in the middle) see one payout, many shipping bills .

What does the document set look like?

A mixed order needs one more document than a goods-only order and one more than a services-only order, and the extra one is the thing that connects them. Assemble the set while the orders are still identifiable on the platform rather than when somebody asks for it.

• The commercial invoice, showing both groups subtotalled separately. This is the document that evidences the split itself. If it shows only an order total, nothing else in the set can be supported.
• A note of the apportionment basis, where the basket was sold at a bundled price. One or two sentences stating the method, kept with the invoice. Consistency across orders is what makes it defensible, and you cannot demonstrate consistency you did not record.
• The Customs declaration and resulting shipping bill for the goods lines only. Carrying the goods subtotal, not the order total.
• The line-item settlement statement for the window the order settled in. Not the payout summary. The summary gives a total, and the total is never what is in dispute. The composition of the credit is.
• The tie-out working, showing both sides summing back to the credit. Goods share against the shipping bill, digital share as services, deductions assigned, residue explained.
• The bank realisation records for both streams. Mapped to the shipping bill on the goods side; held against the services realisation on the digital side, where there is no bill to map to.

Which figures does this guide deliberately not state?

This guide states no rate, threshold, deadline, purpose code or notification number of its own, and that is a design decision rather than an omission. Everything above is structural (which event triggers which record) or arithmetic over your own documents. It holds whatever the current regulatory figures are, and it would still hold if they changed tomorrow. Figures that go stale silently are the failure mode this page is built to avoid.

So where a number is needed, take it from the instrument or from the page that carries it with its citation:

Frequently asked questions

Is a physical-plus-digital order one export or two?

Two, on your side of the transaction, however it looks to the buyer. The physical line is an export of goods: something leaves India, so it is declared to Customs and that declaration becomes a shipping bill or a bill of export, which in turn creates an entry in EDPMS awaiting realisation. The digital line is an export of services or of an intangible: nothing crosses a frontier physically, no Customs event occurs, and no shipping bill exists or ever will. The single order confirmation, the single invoice and the single payout are commercial facts. They do not merge the two regulatory records, and no downstream system is built to accept a record that spans both.

Can I just put the whole order value on the shipping bill to keep it simple?

No, and it is the most expensive of the available mistakes because it is invisible at the time. Declaring the digital consideration as part of the goods FOB overstates the value of what physically left India. That inflated figure then propagates: it is the value EDPMS expects to see realised, so the bill can only ever be filled by allocating money that is not proceeds of the exported goods, and it is the base on which goods-side incentives are computed, so any accrual on it is computed on a base that includes revenue that was never goods. Nothing rejects the declaration when you file it. The consequences surface later, as a permanently under-utilised bill and an incentive claim resting on a value you cannot evidence with a goods invoice.

Where exactly should the split be made?

At the invoice, before anything is filed, and once. The commercial invoice is the only document that sits upstream of every downstream system. The Customs declaration, the GST return, the payout reconciliation and the bank's realisation record all read from it or from figures derived from it. Splitting at the invoice means every system afterwards inherits the same two numbers. Splitting later, separately, in each system is what produces sets of figures that disagree, and the disagreement is discovered during a reconciliation months afterwards rather than at the point it could have been fixed in one edit.

Does the digital line produce an e-BRC?

This guide does not answer that, and the distinction matters more than the answer. What is structural is that the digital line has no shipping bill and no Customs event. That follows from nothing having physically left India. It does not follow from this that the digital line is outside every system: the money still arrives through the banking channel and your AD bank still records it. Whether and how a services realisation is carried through the e-BRC system is a separate question with its own rules, so treat it separately rather than assuming the digital half disappears everywhere at once. Confirm the treatment with your AD bank.

The platform pays me one amount for both lines. How do I evidence the split to my bank?

With the line-item settlement statement for exactly the orders in that payout, not the payout summary. The summary states a total, and the total is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the composition of the credit, which only the line-item export shows. Keep that export for every settlement window while the orders are still identifiable on the platform, alongside the shipping bills for the goods lines and the arithmetic that ties the goods share of the credit to those bills.

Update history

• 2026-09-11 First published.