Mushak 6.3: the VAT tax invoice every registered business must issue

Mushak 6.3 is the tax invoice, called a challan in practice, that a VAT-registered supplier issues to a buyer at the time of a taxable supply. It is the document that carries the VAT from your ledger to theirs. Without it the buyer has no evidence of input tax, and the tax they paid you becomes a cost they cannot recover.

Its content and form are prescribed by the VAT and Supplementary Duty Rules 2016 made under the VAT and Supplementary Duty Act 2012. That is why the layout is not a matter of taste: a challan missing a prescribed particular is a defective challan, and the consequence falls on your buyer first and on you second.

As of 19 August 2026, per the Value Added Tax and Supplementary Duty Act 2012 and its Rules 2016, and the Income Tax Act 2023, as amended by the Finance Act 2026. Rates, thresholds and schedules in Bangladesh are re-issued by SRO, often mid-year, and the figures here are drawn from professional secondary sources because NBR's own site was not reachable at review time. Confirm with your VAT consultant before you rely on any figure here. NBR is the authority; this page is not.

The challan has four blocks: who supplied, who bought, which document this is, and what was actually supplied, followed by a declaration. The tables below give each field, what belongs in it, a filled example, and the error that most often gets that specific field questioned.

The single most expensive habit in this area is treating the challan number as a formatting choice. It is the audit trail. Four rules matter, and all four are about the sequence rather than the individual document.

1. 01The sequence is unbroken. Every number between your first and your last must be accounted for by a document that exists, live or cancelled.
2. 02A number is never reused. If a challan is cancelled, the number stays cancelled and the next supply takes the next number.
3. 03A cancellation is recorded, not deleted. The cancelled document remains in the register, marked, so the run still reads end to end.
4. 04One documented scheme. Per-branch or per-series numbering is workable, but the scheme has to be written down and consistent, because an undocumented restart reads exactly like missing sales.

Not every transaction produces a Mushak 6.3, and issuing one where it does not belong causes its own problems.

• /You are enlisted for turnover tax rather than registered for VAT. An enlisted business issues no tax invoice at all.
• /The supply is exempt under the first schedule. There is no output VAT to carry, so there is nothing for a tax invoice to evidence.
• /The transaction is not a supply: an internal transfer between your own locations under one registration, a pure financial receipt, or a deposit that is not consideration for a supply.
• /A specific class of supply is covered by another prescribed document under the Rules. Where that applies, use the prescribed document rather than a 6.3.

A retail sale to an unregistered consumer is a different case again. The supply is taxable and it belongs in your sales register, but the buyer BIN field has no value to carry because the buyer has none.

As of 19 August 2026, per the Value Added Tax and Supplementary Duty Act 2012 and its Rules 2016, and the Income Tax Act 2023, as amended by the Finance Act 2026. Rates, thresholds and schedules in Bangladesh are re-issued by SRO, often mid-year, and the figures here are drawn from professional secondary sources because NBR's own site was not reachable at review time. Confirm with your VAT consultant before you rely on any figure here. NBR is the authority; this page is not.

NBR has rolled out Electronic Fiscal Devices and the EFD Management System into retail categories, and where a business is covered by that regime the device produces the fiscal receipt and transmits the data. Two things are worth being clear about.

• /An EFD receipt does not remove your obligation to keep the registers. It changes how the document is produced and reported, not what your books must contain.
• /Being on an EFD is not the same as your accounting software being enlisted with NBR. They are separate regimes and a vendor that conflates them in a sales conversation is worth a second question.

As of 19 August 2026, per the Value Added Tax and Supplementary Duty Act 2012 and its Rules 2016, and the Income Tax Act 2023, as amended by the Finance Act 2026. Rates, thresholds and schedules in Bangladesh are re-issued by SRO, often mid-year, and the figures here are drawn from professional secondary sources because NBR's own site was not reachable at review time. Confirm with your VAT consultant before you rely on any figure here. NBR is the authority; this page is not.

5 years, and that covers the challan, the register it lands in and the return it rolls into. Two related deadlines catch people out and neither is about retention:

• /An input-tax credit must be claimed within 4 months of the relevant tax period. A challan you file away without recording is a challan whose tax you will not recover.
• /A buyer BIN has to be right on the day, not corrected later. A 13-digit BIN that turns out to be lapsed will fail the buyer's claim, and a reissued challan months later carries its own questions about the original.

As of 19 August 2026, per the Value Added Tax and Supplementary Duty Act 2012 and its Rules 2016, and the Income Tax Act 2023, as amended by the Finance Act 2026. Rates, thresholds and schedules in Bangladesh are re-issued by SRO, often mid-year, and the figures here are drawn from professional secondary sources because NBR's own site was not reachable at review time. Confirm with your VAT consultant before you rely on any figure here. NBR is the authority; this page is not.

In order of how often they turn into an actual loss rather than a correction.

1. 01A gap in the challan sequence. Auditors read a gap as a suppressed sale, and the burden of explaining it is yours.
2. 02A wrong or lapsed buyer BIN. The buyer loses the input-tax claim and comes back to you for a reissue you may no longer be able to make cleanly.
3. 03The wrong rate on a truncated-base service, in either direction.
4. 04Supplementary duty applied after VAT instead of before it, which understates the VAT base.
5. 05A VAT-inclusive figure typed into a field the form treats as exclusive.
6. 06Issuing the challan days after the supply, so the document date and the movement of goods disagree.
7. 07Line totals that do not reconcile to the column totals.
8. 08Discarding challans before the retention period is up.

Everything above is mechanical, which is exactly why it should not be done by hand. The parts a system can genuinely take off you are the sequence, the per-line tax arithmetic, and the register that has to agree with the challans at the end of the month.