Received an XRechnung? How to open, read and check it

A supplier does not need your consent to send you an e-invoice. This applies when you are both established in Germany and you buy the supply for your business.

The duty covers every business established in Germany. Under the BMF letter, the e-invoice rules also apply when the recipient is a small business under § 19 UStG (Kleinunternehmer), a farmer or forester, or a business with only tax-exempt turnover, for example a landlord who lets a flat. Small businesses do not have to issue e-invoices, but they must be able to receive them.

An e-mail inbox is enough to receive e-invoices. You do not need a separate inbox only for e-invoices. Suppliers can also deliver e-invoices through a portal, by EDI, through an interface or through a shared storage location. You agree the channel with the supplier.

A business that cannot receive an e-invoice, or refuses to accept it, has no right to an invoice in another form.

The tool reads UBL invoices, UBL credit notes and CII invoices. This covers both XRechnung syntaxes. It rejects other XML files.

Our server creates the view with a pinned version of the KoSIT visualization. No AI model reads the file. On the German page, the PDF has German labels. On every other language version, this one included, it has English labels.

The view does not check the invoice. It shows the data as they are in the file. Only a validator shows whether the file meets the XRechnung rules.

Technically, the file is a PDF/A-3 with an embedded CII XML. The pages of the PDF show only the visual part. The XML does not appear there, although it is inside the file. That is why a ZUGFeRD invoice looks like an ordinary PDF invoice.

The XML is the part that counts. If the XML and the visual part differ, the BMF says that the XML data prevail. The BMF therefore recommends that you make the XML part visible yourself. XRechnung to PDF does not read a ZUGFeRD PDF. According to the BMF, the e-invoice viewer of the tax administration in the ELSTER portal also shows ZUGFeRD invoices in readable form.

Not every ZUGFeRD file is an e-invoice under the German VAT Act. The BMF accepts ZUGFeRD from version 2.0.1, but not the MINIMUM and BASIC WL profiles.

Upload the PDF to the ZUGFeRD Validator unchanged. It checks the embedded XML against the rules of its profile, the embedding and PDF/A-3b conformance. The result shows the detected profile. If the result shows the MINIMUM or BASIC WL profile, the file is not an e-invoice under the German VAT Act, even when the check reports no errors.

The XRechnung Validator checks an XML file in UBL or CII with the KoSIT validator. It checks the XML schema, the EN 16931 rules and the German XRechnung rules (BR-DE). Each error appears with its rule code and the affected field.

The validator is free and needs no account. It does not submit the invoice to recipients or portals and does not pass the file on to AI services. If you upload a file to the wrong validator, the page detects the format and names the matching validator, where one exists.

The BMF names a suitable validation application as a way to find format errors. For VAT purposes, a file with format errors is not an e-invoice. It counts as a sonstige Rechnung in another electronic format. Sonstige Rechnung is the legal term for an invoice on paper or in another electronic format.

Under the BMF letter of 15 October 2025 (para. 60), you must keep at least the structured part of an e-invoice so that it remains intact in its original form.

Under the same letter, the general rule is that you keep an invoice in the format in which you received it (section 14b.1(1) sentence 2 UStAE). For an XRechnung, that is the XML file as you received it. In ZUGFeRD and Factur-X, the structured part is the XML inside the PDF. For that reason, keep the PDF file that you received.

A PDF from XRechnung to PDF does not replace the XML. You can file it in addition, for example as a reading copy.