Zentraler User Guide des Forums elektronische Rechnung Deutschland (ZUGFeRD) is a German standard for electronic invoicing. It is s a hybrid format, meaning each invoice is a single file that contains 2 key components:

• A human-readable PDF/A-3 document: This is the visual representation of the invoice that looks like a traditional paper invoice, allowing people to easily view and understand it.

• An embedded, machine-readable XML dataset: This contains the structured invoice data in a format that can be automatically processed by accounting or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

To help ensure your VRBL Documents meet the requirements, create your Documents as outlined in the following sections:

• VRBL: Modeling Overview
• EN 16931: Modeling Overview

Mandate information

ZUGFeRD 2.3 is compliant with EN 16931. EN 16931 is the European standard for electronic invoicing, aiming to harmonize e-invoicing across the EU. ZUGFeRD, particularly from version 2.0 onward, has adopted the necessary specifications to align with this standard.

This compliance makes ZUGFeRD a widely accepted and future-proof format for e-invoicing, especially in the context of European mandates for electronic invoicing in public procurement (B2G) and increasingly in business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

The ZUGFeRD standard utilizes the Cross Industry Invoice (CII) syntax, which is one of the two main syntaxes (the other being UBL) approved by EN 16931.

Details

In this section