How does e-invoicing work?

Support User
1

Hello,
My name is Bastian Schneck. I’ve been following Tryton for several years and read here regularly.
Now I’d like to introduce Tryton to a winemaker friend. The first requirement is that
Tryton can be used to create invoices and to simplify the monthly VAT return to the tax advisor, ideally in DATEV format.

What I’m not yet clear about is how e-invoicing works in Tryton. I’ve installed and activated the “UN/CEFACT” and “UNECE” modules.

And how do I get an e-invoice now? What do I still need to adjust here?

For the second point, the monthly VAT return, there isn’t a module, as far as I know, yet? How do you do that?

2

Those modules are designed to be used by other modules that would need to have an e-document version of a document, like the account_fr_chorus module.

3

I work with “German Account SKR 03 Module”, it is installed and activated. Does it work with this module?

4

UN/CEFACT is independent from the chart of account.
But it is better to set the UNECE codes on the taxes.

5

Does that mean I can’t create an e-invoice with Tryton in Germany?

6

Why do you think that?

7

That was a question, since it seems that another module is needed to create an e-invoice externally. If I understood your Electronic document Post correctly, do I need another module to create an e-invoice?
Apart from the account_fr_chorus module, I haven’t found a comparable one for Germany.

8

account_fr_chorus is the module for now in standard that is using the edocument modules.

9

Thank you for taking your time answering this important question, but I am not clear yet about the answer. Just to point out the importance of Bastian’s question: E-invoicing is now a legal requirement in Germany, so this isn’t just a nice-to-have feature. It’s a blocking requirement for any business using Tryton in the German market.

Having said that, from what I understood, Bastian isn’t asking about theoretical compatibility or UN/CEFACT standards. He’s trying to determine whether Tryton currently supports German e-invoicing standards (like XRechnung or ZUGFeRD), and if not, what would be needed to implement it.

In other words: Is Tryton usable for invoicing in Germany today? If not, is the missing piece a configuration step, a small extension, or a full country-specific module (like account_fr_chorus for France)?

I am not clear about Tryton’s capability of E-invoicing. A clear answer would help anyone evaluating Tryton for use in Germany. Thank you for your amazing work, and taking your time to answer.

10

See here:

11

That UBL module is not sufficient for the German market. Germany does not accept UBL as a compliant e-invoice format, even though UBL 2.3 is EN 16931-compliant. The only legally accepted formats are:

  • XRechnung (for B2G and B2B), and

  • ZUGFeRD 2.1.1 or higher (which embeds XRechnung data in a PDF, primarily used in B2B).

So, from what I know, Tryton does not support e billing for the German market out of the box, and there’s only a commercial option available (m-ds’s XRechnung module).

In other words, one can only use Tryton on the German market if one purchases the m-ds XRechnung module.

12

It’s slowly becoming clearer. Thank you so far. My research on UBL in Germany yielded the following:
“The legally required basis for e-invoicing to public contracting authorities (federal and state) in Germany is the European standard EN 16931. This standard accepts two main data formats:
UBL → Most widely used in international trade.
CII → Also promoted by the UNECE and is an alternative to UBL.”

The post “https://discuss.tryton.org/t/sponsoring-ubl-invoice-2/8529” states:

We propose to write a module edocument_ubl to generate UBL Invoice-2 file for the customer invoices (like edocument_uncefact does for UN/CEFACT)

Does “edocument uncefact” create a file for an invoice? Where can I find the file?

13

In Add edocument_ubl module (!2632) · Merge requests · Tryton / Tryton · GitLab I added an entry in the report menu to render an invoice in the selected e-document format.

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