What is Service Recipient?
The service recipient is the party who receives your service and who is liable to pay for it, usually the client named on your invoice and in your contract. It matters in both GST and FEMA. For GST, one of the conditions in Section 2(6) of the IGST Act for an export of services is that the recipient is located outside India, and the supplier and recipient must not be merely establishments of a distinct person. For the EDF, the recipient is what the bank will match payments against.
Why it matters for exporters
Part 2B of the EDF has one row per invoice, and the first details in each row are the service recipient's name and address, followed by the country. A single monthly EDF can cover invoices to one or more recipients, so a firm with ten foreign clients lists ten names (or more rows, if one client has several invoices). The country column also feeds into how the export is recorded.
Use the recipient's legal name exactly as it appears on your contract and invoice. If a client's group company, agent or platform pays instead, declare that in the third-party fields in Part 1 rather than changing the recipient's name to match the payer.
Example
Sutra Translations Pvt Ltd invoices three clients in October 2026: Helios GmbH in Germany (EUR 3,200), Maple Learning Inc. in Canada (CAD 2,750) and Helios GmbH again (EUR 1,100). Its October EDF has three rows in Part 2B, two naming Helios GmbH with its Berlin address and one naming Maple Learning Inc. with its Toronto address. The EDF is due by 30 November 2026, and Sutra prepares it with the free EDF form tool.
Common confusion
The service recipient is not always the payer, and it is not the same as the consignee in goods trade, although for services the two usually coincide. See EDF Part 2B explained for each column.