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Germany · Receiving mandatory since 2025 · Issuing 2027

E-Invoicing in Germany

Every German business has had to be able to RECEIVE structured e-invoices since January 2025 — no turnover threshold, no small-business exemption. The obligation to issue phases in from 2027.

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In short

E-invoicing in Germany requires domestic B2B invoices to be issued as structured electronic documents through direct exchange between businesses, using XRechnung or ZUGFeRD (EN 16931). Since 1 January 2025, every business in Germany must be able to receive structured electronic invoices — this reception rule has no revenue threshold and small businesses are not exempt. The obligation to ISSUE is phased: from 1 January 2027 for companies with more than EUR 800,000 turnover in the previous calendar year, and from 1 January 2028 for all remaining businesses. The legal basis is the Growth Opportunities Act (Wachstumschancengesetz), anchored in the German VAT Act. A structured format such as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD based on EN 16931 is required; a plain PDF does not qualify as an e-invoice. Whatever the local mechanism, the invoice still has to come out of your ERP correctly — and in our experience that is where projects actually succeed or fail. ROSTAN builds the integration into Oracle EBS and Fusion Receivables so compliance is generated from the invoice the business already raises.

The deadline

Receiving: already live

Dates reported from published guidance. Confirm your own obligation with your tax adviser — ROSTAN implements the ERP integration and does not provide tax or legal advice.

What Germany requires

Since 1 January 2025, every business in Germany must be able to receive structured electronic invoices — this reception rule has no revenue threshold and small businesses are not exempt. The obligation to ISSUE is phased: from 1 January 2027 for companies with more than EUR 800,000 turnover in the previous calendar year, and from 1 January 2028 for all remaining businesses. The legal basis is the Growth Opportunities Act (Wachstumschancengesetz), anchored in the German VAT Act. A structured format such as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD based on EN 16931 is required; a plain PDF does not qualify as an e-invoice.

ecosio — Germany e-invoicing explained

What makes Germany different

The details that change the integration

Receiving is already mandatory

This is the part organisations miss. The reception obligation started in January 2025 and applies to every business regardless of size. If your German entity cannot process an XRechnung or ZUGFeRD document today, you are already behind — and it is an Accounts Payable problem, not an AR one.

A PDF is not an e-invoice

German law distinguishes a structured electronic invoice from an "other invoice". A PDF, even a machine-generated one, falls in the second category. ZUGFeRD is the hybrid answer — a PDF with embedded XML — which is why it is common in Germany.

EUR 800,000 is the dividing line

Prior-year turnover above EUR 800,000 puts you in the 2027 issuing wave; below it, 2028. Groups with several German entities may therefore have different obligation dates internally.

Narrow exemptions

Small-value invoices up to EUR 250, travel tickets and B2C transactions sit outside the mandate. Those carve-outs are narrower than most teams assume and should not drive the design.

The portal is rarely the problem

Statutory e-invoicing is the single largest workload on our own Oracle service desk. These are the causes we see behind rejections, wherever the mandate is.

Tax or product master data that does not match what the schema expects — the most common single cause.

Party identifiers (VAT numbers, registration IDs, addresses) missing or formatted for a human rather than a validator.

A payload that validates in test and fails in production because a real invoice carries a case the sample never did.

No controlled retry path — a rejected invoice is not a valid invoice, and manual re-keying does not scale.

Nobody owning reconciliation: invoices issued in the ERP but never confirmed as accepted downstream.

The receiving side left out of scope, so supplier invoices arrive in a format Accounts Payable cannot process.

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