Quoting CIN is mandatory from April 1 2014 for Companies

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs notified many new sections of the Companies Act 2013 recently. One that requires urgent attention is quoting of the Company Identification Number (aka CIN). This number is printed on the Incorporation certificate and is also available on the MCA portal.

Section 12(3)(c) of Companies Act 2013, which will be effective from April 1 2014, provides that every company shall get its name, address of its registered office and the Corporate Identity Number along with telephone number, fax number, if any, e-mail and website addresses, if any, printed in all its business letters, billheads, letter papers and in all its notices and other official publications.

Any failure to comply with the requirements of this section, the company and every officer who is in default shall be liable to a penalty of Indian Rupees One Thousand for every day during which the default continues but not exceeding Rupees One Lakh.

I still see many companies (E-commerce) sending invoices that do not have CIN mentioned.

If you have pre-printed stationery (for Invoices/Letter Heads), you may get a rubber stamp of your CIN made and stamp each document manually.

On a side note, I sometimes wonder why we have so many IDs and Numbers that need to be maintained. Why can’t there be a universal number that is used by every government department to track business compliance.