EPF (Employee Provident Fund) is an intrinsic part of every working professional’s CTC. Withdrawing it is their right as it is the small part of their total CTC being saved to provide them social security. Though ideally, one should withdraw money at the time of retirement. But, because of the job-hopping millennials and the emergencies that sprang without any prior notice, one can withdraw the amount after successfully completing at least 6 months in an office. So, if you are leaving the office even after a short tenure of 6 months, you can withdraw the amount.
However, going to the EPFO office, standing in queues, or searching for the concerned person is a tedious and hectic task.
The better and smarter way is to generate ECR file for EPF online. The online ECR challan submission is actually quite easy and quick.
This blog will tell you step-by-step the way to do EPF challan online. Take a look.
Step 1: Type Unified Portal EPFO on any search engine like Google etc.
Step 2: There you will see a column on the right side named as “establishment sign in”. Beneath it, you will also find employer sign in. Choose accordingly and enter the credentials.
Step 3: Now is the time to upload ECR. So, check the payments tab on the top bar and select ECR [Upload]
Step 4: Clearly, the screen that will pop after clicking the ECR[Upload] option will have the option to upload the ECR file.
So, click on ‘ECR Help File’ to see the ECR file format.
To upload the ECR file, you must select the wage month, and salary disbursal date.
Step 5: Choose the ECR text file you wish to upload.
Thereafter an ECR text file will appear like so-
Step 6: Pick the remaining fields like the file type i.e ECR, comment, contribution rate which is 12% and then you may click the upload button.
Step 7: Once you have done that, the file will be checked by the unified EPFO portal against the pre-defined one. When they are done with the validation, a green bar with validation successful written on it will appear.
You now need to click on the verify button to get the TRRN which is the temporary return reference number.
What happens when the ECR file validation is unsuccessful?
Instead of the green bar saying validation successful an error message will appear.
Step 8: Now you should fetch the ECR summary sheet after clicking on the ‘Prepare Challan’ button.
Step 9: On the next screen, you can modify the total EDLI contributions (ER share A/C 21), & total EDLI charges (A/c 22), enter administration & inspection charges for total EPFcharges (A/C 2) . As soon as you are done with this, click on “generate challan”.
Step 10: The following challan list page will appear on the screen. You have to click on ‘Finalize’ button, after checking the total amount under draft challan list. Besides, you can even download the receipt file and the acknowledgement file from the “In process challan list”.
Step 11: The final ECR will somehow look like the screenshot shown below.
Step 12: After the same has been finalised, you can take the next step, which is to make the payment. Click on “Pay” icon to do the same.
Step 13: Select the payment mode as online and the bank using which you will be making the payment. Once selected, you should click on continue and navigate to payment gateway without refreshing the page till the payment is done successfully.
I hope I was able to clear the questions like how to generate ECR file for EPF, how to upload ECR file, how to file PF return, how to generate PF challan and many others buzzing in your head till now. In case of any more questions pertaining to this, feel free to call.