@approde please provide more info.

@rihards-simanovics

https://en.e-rechnung-bund.de/

You can find more information here. I am also willing to donate for this function.

Its a feature request

I think this is something we already discussed in the discord it's on the radar of the maintainers, thanks for the input 😊!

@rihards-simanovics Oh sorry, I didn't know that. Thank you very much for your feedback

For clarity here is the link to the discussion, if you are on our discord server you can see it there: 🆕feature-suggestions: European union directive for E-Invoices

Re-opening as a feature request

Hello,

sorry, I haven't seen, that there is already a similar ticket, because I have searched for "ZUGFeRD"...

Let me add my information as well here:

What is ZUGFeRD?
ZUGFeRD is a cross-industry data format for electronic invoice data exchange that was developed by the Forum for Electronic Invoicing Germany (FeRD) - with support from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy. The ZUGFeRD data format is based on the Directive 2014/55/EU of 16 April 2014 on electronic invoicing for public contracts and on the EN16931 standard published on 28 June 2017. Also, the Cross-Industry Invoice (CII) of UN/CEFACT and the ISO standard 19005-3:2012 (PDF/A-3) are also taken into account as of ZUGFeRD 2.0.
The areas of application for this hybrid invoice format are diverse. ZUGFeRD can be used in B2B, B2G, and B2C business transactions.

Description of the Standard:
https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/zugferd-2.3/zugferd-2.3.html

don't worry @Brovning I closed it as the initial message was a question, but I converted it to a Feature Request.

The EU directive requires compliance with regards to eletronic invoices only for B2B transactions; for these XRechung (https://xeinkauf.de/xrechnung/) is a much simpler and better suited format that is also standards compliant.

Yes, that's right.
There are two standards which can be used, BUT:
ZUGFeRD is having the advantage that all information is within one PDF file.
With the XRechnung format you are having a separated XML, which is from my point of view a drawback.

Having ZUGFeRD implemented, you can send the PDF (containing the XML information) to everybody, independent if he likes to use the electronic invoice capabilities or not. For everybody else it is human readable, as it is a PDF file.

Since this is Country/Region specific, a Module would be the best way to move forward with it.

apologies, closed issue by accident.

@Brovning I agree that ZUGFeRD seems to be a better choice for B2C invoices on the first glance.

It has, however, one fatal and incorrectible flaw: there is and will be no way to ensure the invoice data rendered in the PDF part of the document is identical to the embedded XML part. This is no problem as long as there are no malicious parties involved. There is also, and while not having electronic invoice capabilities, will never be, a way for the recipient of the ZUGFeRD document to check if the two parts are identical. Moreover, it will be technically challenging, if not impossible, to verify the two parts are identical by technical means.

On the other hand, automatic processing of the invoice documents will primarily rely on the XML part, so a big source of errors arises, especially for the non tech-save clients without special software. As soon as the electronic invoices gain traction in the B2C environment, malicious parties will pop up from everywhere, trying to trick users to accept invoices with malicious data.

But back to topic: I mainly promote the XRechnung for B2B, because here, the technical ability to accept ANY standards compliant format is required for every german business by law beginning next year (and probably every european business sooner or later). So if you have to use a software that can read any electronic invoice anyways, the PDF part becomes usesless and you will never look at anything besides the XML part, anyways.

There is a PHP SDK for ZUGFeRD/XRechnung:
https://github.com/easybill/zugferd-php

ZUGFeRD PHP SDK (Factur-X, XRechnung) - Convert PHP Objects to XML and back.

Tests are available:
https://github.com/easybill/zugferd-php/tree/master/tests/zugferd10/Tests

@rihards-simanovics
Is this something we can start with?

With the XRechnung format you are having a separated XML, which is from my point of view a drawback.

With XRechnung, you only have an XML file. There is nothing else.

Looks to me as though it's not very simple, I'm going to convert this into a discussion so we can probe all the sides of this before going for implemintation.

There is now an issue to track everything invoice related please find it here: #252