E-invoices and business PDFs: what small businesses must know

What an e-invoice legally is, and what it is not

An e-invoice is not a picture of an invoice. It is the invoice itself as structured data: an XML file in which every value, the seller’s tax number, the invoice number, each line item, the total, the due date, sits in its own labelled field, so software can book it without a human retyping anything. That is the whole idea, and it explains every oddity that follows. The law cares about the data, not about what the file looks like.

Two formats satisfy the German rules, and they could hardly look more different.

XRechnung is pure XML. There is no page to display. Double-click one and you see code, or an error, which is why so many people think the file is broken. It is not broken; it was never meant for eyes. Software reads it. There is a separate guide on this site about what an XRechnung is and the honest ways to read one today.

ZUGFeRD is a normal PDF with the same XML embedded inside it. You open it like any invoice PDF, read it, print it, forward it, and the page looks like every invoice you have ever received. The machine-readable XML travels along invisibly, and an accounting program reads that instead of the page. People read the PDF, machines read the XML, and both carry the same invoice.

	ZUGFeRD	XRechnung
What the file is	A normal PDF with the invoice as XML embedded inside	A pure XML file, data only
What opening it shows	The invoice page, in any PDF viewer	Code, or an error; there is no page
Who reads it	People read the page, machines read the XML	Machines, unless a viewer renders it
File extension	.pdf	.xml

And the file you probably send today, a plain PDF exported from Word or an invoicing template? It stays a perfectly good document, but once the issuing duties apply to you, it stops counting as an e-invoice. There is no XML inside, so there is nothing for the receiving software to read. For the law, a plain PDF and a sheet of paper end up in the same drawer: readable by people, invisible to machines.

To see which kind of PDF you have been sent, drop it on Inspect. A ZUGFeRD lists its attached XML by name under Attachments, usually factur-x.xml (ZUGFeRD 2.1 and later), zugferd-invoice.xml (2.0) or xrechnung.xml; a plain PDF shows “Attachments: none”. An XRechnung is the .xml itself, and Inspect, which reads only PDFs, leaves it out (“Left out 1 file this tool does not take”).

The deadlines, one at a time

Since 1 January 2025: every business must be able to receive e-invoices. This one already applies to you, whatever your size, a freelancer with 1 laptop included. It is also the cheapest duty on the list: receiving is satisfied by an email inbox that accepts XML and PDF attachments. You do not have to buy anything; you have to not refuse the format.

From 1 January 2027: businesses with more than 800,000 euro turnover in the previous year must issue e-invoices. If a plumbing firm in Linz with German business customers crosses that line, its plain PDF invoices to them stop being enough, and the files it sends must carry the XML.

From 1 January 2028: everyone must issue them. The turnover threshold falls away, and the smallest business sending invoices to German business customers is in.

From 1 July 2030: the EU requires e-invoicing for cross-border trade. An invoice from Vienna to a business customer in another EU country moves to structured formats too, so the question stops being a German one.

The exact table of who is caught by which date, and the exceptions, is its own reference guide in this cluster. One line that matters here: this page explains the rules, it is not legal or tax advice. The German dates come from the German Federal Ministry of Finance’s e-invoice FAQ, the 2030 date from the EU’s VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) package, adopted by the Council on 11 March 2025; all checked on 11 October 2026. Your tax advisor knows which apply to your numbers.

What to do this quarter, without buying anything

The deadlines reward a small amount of boring preparation, and all of it is free.

1. Give invoices one front door. A single address, something like invoices@ your domain, that accepts XML and PDF attachments. That alone satisfies the receiving duty that has applied since 2025, and it means the file you need in April is not buried in a colleague’s personal inbox.
2. Have a way to read both formats. ZUGFeRD costs you nothing to read: it opens like any PDF. For an XRechnung the honest options today are your accounting software, your tax advisor, or opening the XML in a text editor and finding the amount and due date by their labelled fields. It is clumsy, but it works, and there is a guide here on receiving e-invoices without buying software. Our own on-device reader is coming.
3. Archive the original file, not a print of it. For ZUGFeRD and XRechnung the XML is legally the invoice, so the file you received is the thing to keep: unchanged, in a dated folder, with a filename that sorts, like 2026-10-11-supplier-invoice.pdf. Re-saving a ZUGFeRD through some PDF editors or a print to PDF silently drops the embedded XML, so the original stays untouched. How to keep invoices readable for the full retention period is covered in the archiving guide of this cluster.

That is the whole quarter’s homework. No subscription, no suite, no migration project.

The invoice work you can do free, today

The deadlines are about tomorrow’s invoices. Today’s invoices still need the same handling they always did, and that part you can already do free, on your device.

Get the amounts into a spreadsheet. The monthly ritual of retyping totals from invoice PDFs into a sheet can stop now. Drop an invoice below: the line items and totals come out as cells, and the amounts arrive as numbers you can sum, not as text.

The converter reads both decimal conventions, so 1.190,00 on a German invoice and 1,190.00 on an English one both land as the same number, and your column sums correctly on the first try. Invoice numbers, IBANs and account numbers stay text, so a leading zero is never eaten. On our invoice fixture the full line-item table extracts with the totals intact; a scanned paper invoice is a photo, though, and needs OCR first.

Build the month, or the deal, into 1 file. Twenty receipt PDFs, or a contract and its exhibits, hand in better as a single document. Merge PDF puts them together in the order you choose:

Merge PDFCombine files, reorder, keep bookmarks. Free, runs on your device.Open

Then add page numbers, so the pack says page 4 of 31 and “the clause on page 17” means the same thing to you, your customer and your accountant. If the merged file is too heavy for an email, compress it after. The general craft of merging, splitting and reordering has its own pillar: organise PDF pages.

Strip what should not travel. A business PDF quietly carries metadata: the author field (often an employee’s login name), the producing software, creation and modification dates, sometimes an internal file path. Before a quote or a contract leaves the house, remove PDF metadata clears those traces, and the visible content stays untouched:

Remove metadataAuthor, dates, XMP, hidden data. Free, runs on your device.Open

Run Inspect first and read your own file the way a curious client would: it shows the metadata with readable dates, any attached files by name, scripts and digital signatures. The modification date alone can contradict a cover email. What else can hide in a document, and what true redaction means, is the subject of the privacy and protection pillar.

Lock what travels. When an invoice or contract goes somewhere it should not be opened casually, protect PDF encrypts the file with AES-256, so it cannot be opened without the password. If you fill out forms or offers before sending, flatten them first so the entered values become fixed page content. And if a received file looks off, new bank details, an odd sender, Inspect shows what it really contains before you pay anything: attached files by name, scripts a viewer might run, and how many digital signatures it carries. It counts signatures; it does not check that they are valid. What signatures prove lives in the sign and fill pillar. One more rule for signed files: any tool that writes a new PDF from one, merge and compression included, warns that the copy’s signature no longer checks out, so keep the signed original.

All of this runs in your browser, on your device. Nothing is uploaded, and for invoices and contracts that is precisely the point: the files that carry your prices, your margins and your customers’ bank details never exist on anyone’s server. You can check the claim in a minute: use a tool once, turn Wi-Fi off, and it still works.

The second law: accessible PDFs

While the e-invoicing dates get the headlines, a second piece of EU law already applies and also points at PDFs. The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) applies since 28 June 2025 to products and services sold to consumers in the EU, and PDFs that are part of such a service, manuals, contracts, statements, tickets, need to be accessible. The usual yardstick for an accessible PDF is PDF/UA.

PDF/UA, in 1 paragraph: it is the standard for PDFs a screen reader can actually use. The page carries an invisible structure, tags, that say “this is a heading”, “this is a table”, “this image shows a floor plan”, in a logical reading order, with a title and a language set. Two files can look identical on screen and be night and day for a blind reader: one is a structured document, the other a bag of positioned letters. A scan is the worst case; to a screen reader it is a blank photograph.

Two reliefs before anyone panics. First, the EAA has an exemption for micro enterprises providing services, fewer than 10 staff and no more than 2 million euro annual turnover or balance sheet total, which takes most 1-person businesses out of its scope. Second, it covers documents that are part of a consumer service, not every file on your laptop. Whether and how it applies to your business is its own guide in this cluster, and that question, where it is close, is one for a lawyer: this explains the rules, it is not legal advice.

What you can do today: open the file in Acrobat Reader and look at File, Properties: the Description tab names the title and says “Tagged PDF: Yes” or “No”, and the Advanced tab shows the language. Untagged means not even close, and knowing that costs nothing. getPDF’s Inspect shows the title in the metadata but does not check tags or language today; a pre-check that reads a file against the PDF/UA requirements on your device is coming to getPDF.

What getPDF does not do yet

The honest part, so you can plan around it.

We cannot read e-invoice XML yet. Inspect names the XML file a ZUGFeRD carries, but it does not display the invoice values inside it, and it does not open an XRechnung .xml at all. An on-device reader that shows an XRechnung or a ZUGFeRD’s data as a readable invoice is coming. Until then, the ways to read one are your accounting software, your tax advisor’s portal, or a free online viewer, with the caveat that most free viewers upload your invoice to their server to render it, which is exactly what this site exists to avoid.

We cannot create e-invoices yet. There is no tool here that writes XRechnung or ZUGFeRD files; a maker is coming. If your issuing deadline is close, the options that exist today are your invoicing or accounting software (most German packages write both formats) or your tax advisor’s platform. Converting a plain PDF into a screenshot of itself does not make it an e-invoice; the XML is what counts.

We cannot check accessibility yet. Inspect does not look at tags, reading order or the document language. Real validation today needs a dedicated checker, such as Acrobat Pro or the free veraPDF; our own on-device pre-check is coming.

When these ship, they follow the same rule as everything else on this site: they run on your device, free, with no account, and nothing is uploaded. Until they ship, this page says so instead of pretending.