How to create a report that is in XML format for compliance with electronic invoice laws

Support Developer
1

Machine-readable invoices are more and more requested by companies, and it is already a hard requirement for several years when contracting a public institution in Germany, e.g. a University. In other words, it is not possible to sell goods or services to a German public institution if you can’t send an invoice in a specific XML format, called “XRechnung”. They don’t even want to see a PDF anymore. The XML file can be send to them by email attachment.

Currently, Tryton only supports Relatorio-based invoices, which according to my understanding creates office documents, not XML-formatted text files.

If I want to implement an invoice that is in XML-format, how would the general approach be like?

2

You would usually go with raw Genshi templating (the xml manipulation library that relatorio uses under the hood).

Basically:

from genshi.template import MarkupTemplate
template = MarkupTemplate("insert xml template here")
result = template.generate(**context).render('xml')

You could then create a model to store the templates, and a wizard to trigger the generation.

3

We have UN/CEFACT edocument.I guess check what xml standard Xreichnung is using.

In Romania we have for example CIUS-RO which can use both UN/CEFACT and UBL but the UN/CEFACT was deprecated. I guess the CIUS-DE are rules on top of the edocument.

4

That’s amazing! XRechnung is based on the european standard UN/CEFACT, and extends it a bit to follow German law, e.g. some fields that are optional in UN/CEFACT are obligatory in XRechnung.

I activated the edocument_uncefact module but couldn’t figure out how to create an XML file. On the invoice tab I still can only print to ODT. The search box doesn’t show anything for cefact. Can someone provide me a hint how to get to the XML file from here?

5

You can create a custom module that extends _execute method of the invoice report.
The following code is incomplete, but it might give you an idea:

class InvoiceReport(Report):
    __name__ = 'account.invoice'

    @classmethod
    def _execute(cls, records, header, data, action):
        ...code to generate payload...
        return 'xml', payload
6

The module was designed initially to work with modules like account_fr_chorus for full automation.
Now it should be possible to extend the module to provide a way to directly retrieve the generated XML.

7

@dotbit, @ced, that sounds great, I’ll start making a German XRechnung module then based on edocument_uncefact .

I still have to figure out a couple things though, for example some fields might be obligatory for XRechnung that are optional on the default invoice form (field BT-10 comes to my mind).

But I assume there is a way to modify the backend form and form validation from the existing module API.

8

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