Выставление счетов

Writing invoices in Germany is not a creative act but a compliance drill with traps. Section 14 of the VAT Act dictates what has to be on it: full name and address of both parties, tax number or VAT ID, sequential invoice number, service date, quantity and type of service, net amount, tax rate, tax amount. Forget one mandatory field and your customer risks losing their input tax deduction - and then they call you. The invoicing system knows these mandatory fields and keeps you from dropping one.

The free version is the entry point, and it is not a stripped-down form but the same editor as in the suite. Type in the recipient, line items and your bank details and get a ZUGFeRD e-invoice per EN 16931 in the DIN 5008 layout, one per day, with a light Fakturen logo at the bottom of every page. Add your IBAN and a SEPA QR code lands on the invoice automatically, which your customer scans with their banking app to pay in seconds. Small business under Section 19 and reverse charge are a choice of tax mode. Without an account you start right away; with a free account you can also save your customers.

The full suite lifts this to business grade. Instead of single documents you get a real document chain: a quote turns into an order confirmation with one click, then a delivery note, then the invoice. Line items and customer data carry over, you never retype. Customer and article masters fill themselves, you keep an eye on open items and incoming payments, and the dunning workflow with reminders and escalation levels runs semi-automatically on request.

E-invoicing is no longer optional. Since 2025 every German company must be able to receive B2B e-invoices; the issuing obligation applies by turnover from 01/01/2027 (above 800,000 euros previous-year turnover) and from 01/01/2028 for everyone. The suite produces ZUGFeRD and XRechnung per EN 16931, meaning structured XML data embedded inside a PDF/A-3 that both humans and machines can read. Incoming e-invoices can be read into the inbox and processed. For public-sector invoices (B2G) there is the Leitweg-ID routing.

GoBD is the part most tools stay quiet about. Invoices must be immutable, traceable and kept for ten years. The suite finalizes invoices (Festschreibung), issues sequential, gapless number ranges and logs changes instead of silently overwriting them. For your tax advisor there is a DATEV export so your bookkeeping does not drown in email attachments.

The rest is what saves you time: recurring invoices for subscriptions and retainers, partial and final invoices for projects, CSV import for the customer master, cash discount and payment terms, reports on turnover and open items. None of it is mandatory - you can just write a quick invoice and leave. But when your shop grows, the system grows with it.

And yes, it stays data-frugal where it can. The free version sends the invoice data to our server in Germany only to create the file and does not store it; the full suite only stores what the document chain and GoBD actually require. No invoice wanders into someone elses cloud. Your numbers are yours.