Bye bye paper clutter: digital accounting with e-invoicing.
Easily creating, sending, receiving, and processing e-invoices.
Highlights
- Creating, sending, receiving, processing, validating, and storing e-invoices based on ZUGFeRD or XRechnung
- Automated provision, verification, and processing of GoBD-compliant XML datasets
- Flexible integration of company-specific accounting systems
- Mapping to client-specific in-house formats
- Provision of customized analyses and overviews
Fact Sheet
| Excerpt of Clients | Einkaufsbüro Deutscher Eisenhändler GmbH GO! Express & Logistics Deutschland GmbH hagebau IT GmbH |
| Sectors | Logistics, retail and others |
Missions accomplished
- Applications
- Automation
- Connectivity
Smart technology
- Virtimo Digitalization Suite
E-invoicing obligation as a boost for digitalization.
E-invoicing is coming – for all industries! With the Growth Opportunities Act passed in March 2024, new regulations for companies in Germany regarding the issuance, processing, and archiving of invoices have been introduced. The primary aim is to simplify tax procedures and accelerate the digitalization of accounting.
The result: the new e-invoicing requirement will be gradually implemented by 2028, with several transitional periods. Companies must be able to receive e-invoices from January 1, 2025. However, other invoice formats may continue to be received during the transition period until the end of 2026. From 2026, sending e-invoices will also become mandatory.
While this may initially seem just another obligation, it simultaneously offers companies the opportunity to make their accounting processes more efficient and future-proof – in the long term, even at a European level: By 2030, e-invoicing is set to become the standard across the EU.
E-invoicing is much more complex than it initially seems. At first, we thought a bit of format conversion and validation would suffice – but it’s not that simple. What most companies likely underestimated in particular is the validation of ZUGFeRD messages and the fact that there are different versions. On top of this, there is the question of: What do I do with the data in the end? I believe even the service providers have little answer to this.
Steffen Lehmann
Head of Sales | Virtimo AG
PDF with XML according to GoBD – say what?!
The obligations for the security and storage of e-invoices are clearly defined in §14 Paragraph 4 of the German Value Added Tax Act [UStG]. To ensure compliance with the ‘Principles for properly maintaining, keeping and storing books, records and documents in electronic form’ [GoBD], e-invoices must also be received, processed, and stored in the exact format in which they were originally sent, for at least ten years.
By 2028 at the latest, in addition to an appropriate transmission method – whether via email, upload, or an invoicing tool – a standardized data format will also be required for the electronic exchange of structured invoice information. While the hybrid invoicing format ZUGFeRD combines the visual invoice image [PDF] with an embedded XML data layer, XRechnung is based on an XML-based data model. Both formats allow for seamless machine processing through company-specific software solutions.
Our solution allows clients to consolidate customer and invoice data from different tables to create e-invoices – including XML and PDF formats, as well as customized letterheads.
Alexander Schmidt
Consulting | Virtimo AG
Ready for e-invoicing:Virtimo Digitalization Suite.
As an integral part of the Virtimo Digitalization Suite, INUBIT is already capable of processing various individual data formats such as Transdata, CSV, or EDIFACT. Now, our backend platform also enables the seamless processing of the new structured standard formats to capture and distinctly assign invoice data according to a clear, logical structure.
“Since invoice processing for our existing clients like E|D|E, GO!, hagebau, and Bartels-Langness is already fully managed through the Virtimo Digitalization Suite, it made sense to gradually integrate e-invoicing into INUBIT as well,” explains Alexander Schmidt, Consultant at Virtimo.
Since the new data exchange standards are not standalone applications but rather a translation or structural description of a dataset, they first had to be mapped to the existing accounting systems of our clients. After numerous iterations, we optimized our business process engine INUBIT in a short space of time to accurately capture, process, store, and deliver new formats like ZUGFeRD, XRechnung, and others to the company-specific accounting systems and invoicing portals.
Easy validation, seamless integration.
Companies of all industries and sizes face the challenge of meeting the mandatory requirements for sending, processing, storing, and validating e-invoices. With our tailored solution, these data processing workflows can not only be efficiently managed but also seamlessly integrated into existing accounting systems.
Through our central data management platform INUBIT and the Virtimo Digitalization Suite, this is achieved automatically, with minimal effort and with included monitoring – both on-premise and in the cloud. Verifying the received data plays a crucial role in this process. “In the future, a validation package will complement the Virtimo Digitalization Suite. We have already developed workflows and created templates that only need to be adjusted for each client to transfer the data into their respective backend systems,” emphasizes Steffen Lehmann, Head of Sales at Virtimo.
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