Electronic invoices offer a number of benefits for businesses. In particular, they can be processed automatically and continuously, without switching media formats. Due to legal requirements, companies in the EU are obliged to send or receive electronic invoices to their business partners. The transition periods vary from country to country. However, a simple PDF file is not considered an electronic invoice for this purpose. The data must be structured, for example in XML format. The EU standard CEN 16931:2017 defines in detail the requirements that electronic invoices must meet. The main formats established on the basis of this standard are the XRechnung and the Factur-X standard (known as a ZUGFeRD invoice in Germany). This latter hybrid format has the advantage of supporting immediate visual display for interactive validation.
Hybrid invoices
Hybrid invoices with pdfaPilot
In principle, any structured invoice format can be integrated into a PDF container. However, Factur-X and ZUGFeRD predefines how this should work. In this case, the PDF container must align with the archiving standard known as PDF/A.
pdfaPilot makes it possible to convert XML data records in either ZUGFeRD/Factur-X or XRechnung format into hybrid invoices. The solution uses PDF/A-3 as the carrier format for transmitting invoices. Invoice recipients can use pdfaPilot to validate both the XML data and the PDF/A file. They can also extract and visualize the embedded structured invoice data. This makes it very easy to check whether the data matches the information displayed in the PDF file.
pdfaPilot also generates structured data in other hybrid invoice formats based on PDF/A. In this case, the callas solution again validates the PDF/A component and extracts the structured invoice data for further processing.
