E-Rechnung (German B2B e-invoicing)

E-Rechnung is Germany’s requirement for structured electronic invoicing in domestic business-to-business transactions. An E-Rechnung in the legal sense is not a PDF sent by email: it is an invoice issued, transmitted, and received in a structured electronic format that can be processed automatically and that meets the European standard for electronic invoicing.

What the obligation actually covers

The rollout separates two obligations that are easy to conflate. Being able to receive a structured e-invoice came first and applies broadly to domestic businesses, with no equipment beyond the ability to accept and store a compliant file. Being obliged to issue every domestic B2B invoice in a structured format follows later, phased in by company size and turnover, with transitional arrangements that allow other formats during the interim period. Smaller issuers get more time than large ones.

Two formats dominate in practice. XRechnung is a pure XML format, originally built for invoicing German public bodies and widely used as the reference implementation of the European standard. ZUGFeRD is a hybrid: a PDF/A document with the structured XML embedded inside it, so a human can read the page while a machine reads the data. Both satisfy the structural requirement; the choice usually comes down to what a company’s trading partners can process. Delivery often runs over email or a portal, and increasingly over Peppol.

Why it changes finance work

The compliance question is narrow: can you receive, can you issue, can you archive. The operational question is larger. Once payables arrive as structured data, the accrual that used to be typed from a scanned invoice can be derived from the document itself, and the gap between what was invoiced and what was booked becomes measurable rather than assumed. Teams that leave the structured file in a mailbox and keep keying from the PDF rendering carry the cost of the mandate without any of the benefit.

How Rexfin handles it

Rexfin reads structured invoice formats as source documents, pulling the underlying data rather than the rendered page, and reconciles it against the posted ledger entry. Each figure keeps a citation back to the invoice that supports it, so a payables or revenue line can be traced to a specific document, and the same lineage discipline covers German, Peppol, and ZATCA e-invoice data in one model.