two of a kind – ZUGFeRD & XRechnung
e-invoices in the business-to-business & business-to-government sector
The advantages offered by electronic invoicing and invoice receipt have now arrived at many businesses. In this respect, two invoice formats dominate things. First things first: Your solution should support both.
ZUGFeRD-2.1 –for the b2b area
The German Forum for Electronic Invoicing (FeRD) has developed a common, cross-cutting format for electronic invoices: ZUGFeRD. Starting in 2014 with version 1.0, the development of the format is now at ZUGFeRD 2.1 (2020).
The ZUGFeRD invoice format allows for invoice data to be transferred in a PDF file on a structured basis – and to be read and processed without additional manual processing steps. ZUGFeRD therefore consists of a hybrid format. In this context, an invoice has two parts: on the one hand, the human-readable PDF part of the invoice, and on the other, the XML-based, machine-readable part.
The ZUGFeRD invoice format was developed with the participation of companies from the automotive sector and the retail, banking and software industries, and also from the govern-mental sector.
Learn more in our blog article
XRechnung – for the b2g area
Compulsory for invoices of over 1,000 Euro from 2020
The EU Directive (2014/55/EU) on electronic invoicing for government contracts has been in force since November 2018. Having initially been compulsory for federal ministries and constitutional bodies, since the end of 2019, all federal agencies and public clients have also been subject to this requirement. On November 27th, 2020, at the latest, the requirement for all suppliers to the German federal government to submit invoices in electronic form according to specific format requirements – as an XRechnung – will enter into effect. Incidentally: From 2020, invoices with a value of more than 1,000 Euros have only been accepted in electronic form.
The XRechnung is an XML-based invoice format – which means it is machine-readable and very easy to process. The XRechnung is based on the European standard EN169331. This standard was developed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) as part of EU Directive 2014/55/EU. Every EU member state is required to develop its own specification, known as the CIUS (Core Invoice Usage Specification). XRechnung are made visible by an incoming invoice solution by generating a PDF from the XML file.
