On 2026-03-03 Jochen Stärk wrote in Frankfurt am Main, Germany:
E-invoices no longer free?
Since France’s system has cancelled major parts of it’s public invoicing portal and therefore using commercial service providers has now become mandatory, which means that every french company will have to select commercial service providers to send and receive invoices. Those services are not free because they have to certify themselves commercially and sign up to other commercial services which require even further certification. PDPLibre would like to change that retroactively for France.
Axel Kannenberg, a journalist from the Heise publishing house, was as kind as to ask the german Ministry of Finance if that will also happen in Germany. They replied on 29.01. and apparently they are working intensively on having it available as cheap as possible, i.e. the answer is not a “no” but a “maybe”.
Although this will hit us in some years, i.e. is not related to the upcoming obligation to send e-invoices which starts beginning of 2027, please do already sign up to my online petition to continue to be able to send/receive invoices to make the message clear.
Minor news
The German Ministry of Finance made up it’s mind on gastronomical expenses in the age of e-invoices and there was the publication of a way to use Wirtschafts-IDs in e-invoices (Geba). I’m just not sure if that mainly or only concerns Peppol at the moment.
I learned Bitkom has a GoBD Checklist since a while and of course Poland introduced it’s Continous Transaction Control System (Umsatzsteuermeldesystem) on February 1st apparently with a proprietary format called KSEF.
EN16931:2025
The new, second major version of the EN16931-standard has finally been accepted. Apparently there was a lot of input from the industry and private economy but I have no idea what that means. Rumours were the formats will be upraded (e.g. Cross Industry Invoice from 16B to the backward compatible 22B? 25B?) and there will be extensions, but I have no clear picture yet when what will be officially published, much less be officially binding.
Easy E-Rechnung
I am no real father yet but sometimes it feels like my open source projects, Mustang and Quba, were my children. And after my first “grandson” a while ago (Andreas Rudolphs “ZUGFeRD Manager“) I’m very proud to present my second “granddaughter”, Mustangs’ child, Easy E-Rechnung. The work Mustang does in that scenario is almost neglectible and I’ve made only very minor contributions, comparable maybe to babysitting, to Easy E-Rechnung itself but Aron Homberg is a real AI crack and it’s… just magic.
It’s open source scan-to-Factur-X, i.e. a GUI on a invoice recognition. Which you can run locally on your GPU and you are presented a suggestion how the future Factur-X look like, which you can often just approve. Given the fact that invoice recognition will remain neccessary for non-EU-imports now at least there’s a way to start automatizing it using open source. And I have to admit I personally never quite managed to get InvoiceNet running and invoice2data is template based (see zugferd.org for the links).
