e-Invoicing: XRechnung and ZUGFeRD
When a German e-invoice is legally required, the two dates that decide it, and the exemptions that still apply.
An e-invoice is a machine-readable invoice: structured data your client's system can read without a human retyping it. Steerd produces XRechnung and ZUGFeRD.
Two dates, not one
The German mandate is phased in, and which date applies to you depends on your turnover:
- 1 January 2027 if your total turnover in 2026 was above EUR 800.000.
- 1 January 2028 otherwise.
Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive, so Steerd derives it from the invoice's own issue date rather than from today's date. An invoice dated last year is judged by last year's rules.
What Steerd tells you on the draft
The editor says which of three cases you are in.
Required. "This invoice will be issued as an e-invoice. German law requires it for this supply." You have no choice, and the checklist will ask for the extra details an e-invoice needs.
Voluntary, and you opted in. You may always issue an e-invoice even when not obliged to.
A plain PDF, with the reason. Steerd names why the mandate does not reach this invoice:
| Reason | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not yet mandatory | The phase-in has not reached you. |
| Small-business scheme | Under Paragraph 19 UStG you are permanently exempt from issuing. |
| Small amount | Invoices up to EUR 250,00 may stay ordinary invoices (Paragraph 33 UStDV). |
| Consumer recipient | The mandate covers business customers; this client is recorded as a private individual. |
| Exempt supply | Depending on the exemption, this supply may sit outside the obligation. |
In every one of those cases you can still choose to issue an e-invoice.
Being exempt from issuing is not being exempt from receiving
Worth saying plainly, because it is the half people miss: the exemptions above are about invoices you send. Businesses in Germany have had to be able to receive e-invoices since 1 January 2025, whatever their size and whatever the small-business scheme says.
What an e-invoice additionally needs
Machines do not infer. On top of the ordinary checklist an e-invoice asks for your contact name, email and phone, your electronic address, your IBAN, an identifier for you (VAT ID or commercial register number), and the client's electronic address, which for a public-sector client is typically their Leitweg-ID.
Fill these in once in Settings, Invoicing and they stop coming up.
If it cannot be produced
Occasionally the checklist reports that the invoice cannot become a valid e-invoice and names a rule. That is a real incompatibility rather than a missing field, and it is worth reporting. A correction of a plain-PDF invoice is the common case: the details it would need are sealed inside the original.