Germany XRechnung & ZUGFeRD Compliance

The problem

German public-sector buyers will not accept a PDF attached to an email. Invoices sent to federal and Land contracting authorities must arrive as structured XRechnung documents that pass the KoSIT validator, and phased B2B e-invoicing obligations mean private customers are increasingly asking for the same structured payloads or for hybrid ZUGFeRD files where the machine-readable XML lives inside a PDF/A-3 container.

Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations gives you a general Electronic reporting engine and generic European formats, but it does not ship a production-ready German pipeline. Teams end up hand-editing ER configurations they do not fully understand, discovering at go-live that a Leitweg-ID is missing, that a Buyer reference field is empty, that the payment terms text does not parse, or that the PDF/A-3 attachment fails conformance checking. The failures are silent until the receiving portal rejects the document, and by then the invoice is late.

This is a build-to-order engagement. Nothing here is a shrink-wrapped download. ECOSIRE scopes your legal entities, your customer mix and your transmission channels, then builds and installs the extension in your environments.

What ECOSIRE builds

X++ extension model, no overlayering

The solution ships as one or more X++ extension models layered over the standard Application Suite and Electronic Reporting modules. Standard objects are extended with event handlers, chain-of-command classes, table and form extensions, and extended data types — never overlayered — so your environment stays serviceable and One Version updates apply cleanly.

Document generation

We build the XRechnung output as an Electronic reporting format configuration derived from the invoice data model, mapped to your posted CustInvoiceJour and CustInvoiceTrans records, project invoice proposals and free text invoices. Both syntaxes are covered: UBL 2.1 Invoice and CreditNote, and UN/CEFACT CII cross-industry invoice, selectable per customer or per legal entity because German authorities differ in what they accept.

ZUGFeRD output embeds the CII XML into a PDF/A-3 rendering of your existing invoice report, so a human reader sees the layout they expect while the buyer's system reads the structured data from the attachment.

Master data the standard tables do not hold

German e-invoicing needs fields F&O has no home for. We add extension tables and form controls for the Leitweg-ID (routing identifier) per customer and per delivery address, buyer reference, order reference, contract and project references, the responsible contact and their email, and per-entity seller registration details including the tax registration and commercial register entries. These are maintained on the customer master and default onto sales orders and invoices, with validation at entry rather than at transmission.

Validation before transmission

Every generated document is checked against the schema and against the EN 16931 business rules and the German CIUS restrictions before it can be released. Failures are written to a rejection log with the specific rule identifier and the field that caused it, so an AP or AR clerk sees "buyer reference is required for this customer" instead of a raw XPath error.

Transmission and status

We wire outbound delivery to the channel you actually use: Peppol access point via a REST integration, an authority portal upload, or a monitored file or SFTP drop with a defined naming convention. Transmission runs on the batch framework with retry and a bounded backoff, and the acknowledgement or rejection returned by the channel is written back onto the invoice journal so the status is visible from the invoice inquiry form.

Batch, workflow and archive

A recurring batch job picks up newly posted invoices per legal entity, generates, validates, transmits and archives. Failed documents route through a workflow so a named approver can correct master data and resubmit. Every generated artifact is stored against the invoice as an attachment so an audit request is answered from inside F&O.

Data entities and integration

We expose the added fields through data entities so they are importable through the Data management framework and readable over OData — you can load Leitweg-IDs for thousands of customers from a spreadsheet instead of typing them, and downstream systems can read invoice transmission status without a database connection.

Who it is for

Organisations running Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations with German legal entities that invoice public-sector bodies, and companies preparing for the phased German B2B structured invoicing obligations. It suits shared service centres invoicing Germany from a non-German entity as much as it suits a German operating company, because the configuration is per legal entity.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We walk your legal entity structure, your invoice types (sales, free text, project), your customer mix, which syntax each buyer requires, and your intended transmission channel. We look at your existing invoice report design because ZUGFeRD embeds into it. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope and a fixed price. No hourly drift. 3. Build. We develop in our own environment against your target F&O version, with unit tests and a validation suite run against sample documents from your data. 4. Install in test. We deploy the deployable package to your sandbox through your LCS pipeline, configure the entities, and run a joint acceptance session where your team generates and validates real invoices. 5. Production. After your sign-off, the same package moves to production through your normal release process. We attend the first production run. 6. Support. A defined support window follows go-live, covering defects, and covering format or rule updates published within that window.

What we do not claim

We do not certify your compliance — your tax advisor does. We build the software that produces conformant documents and proves it with validation output. Transmission through a Peppol access point requires a contract with an access point provider; we integrate with the one you choose, we are not one.