XRechnung

XRechnung is Germany's standard for electronic invoices. Technically, it is a Core Invoice Usage Specification (CIUS) of the European standard EN 16931: it adopts the standard's semantic data model with its Business Terms (BT) and Business Groups (BG) and adds national business rules. It is published by KoSIT, the Coordination Office for IT Standards, on behalf of Germany's IT Planning Council.

An XRechnung is a pure XML file with no human-readable layer. It comes in one of two syntaxes, UBL 2.1 or UN/CEFACT CII, which are legally equivalent. For invoices to public-sector buyers the Leitweg-ID is mandatory as the buyer reference (BT-10), and submission runs through the federal and state invoice portals such as ZRE and OZG-RE or through the Peppol network. In B2B, XRechnung is one of the formats businesses can use to meet the e-invoicing mandate.

In this category we walk through how an XRechnung is structured, which fields are mandatory, how to state a Leitweg-ID correctly and how to create, read and check a file. Our examples use the real field names and XML paths. The free XRechnung viewer turns any file into a readable invoice, the e-invoice generator creates compliant invoices, and the Leitweg-ID validator checks the check digits.