eInvoice Mandate 2025: How to Prepare Your Wholesale Business

Starting January 2025, all B2B companies in Germany must be able to receive electronic invoices. By 2027, most businesses will also need to send them. For food wholesalers handling hundreds of invoices monthly, preparation is critical.

There are two main eInvoice formats in Germany: XRechnung (XML-based, required for public sector) and ZUGFeRD (hybrid PDF with embedded XML, widely used in B2B). ZUGFeRD is particularly popular among food distributors because it looks like a normal PDF but contains machine-readable data.

For food wholesalers, the transition to eInvoicing means rethinking how invoices are created, sent, and archived. Manual PDF generation will no longer suffice — your invoicing system needs to produce structured data that can be processed automatically by your customers' accounting systems.

The practical steps for preparation include: ensuring your software supports ZUGFeRD or XRechnung output, setting up proper invoice numbering sequences, configuring tax rates correctly (standard 19% and reduced 7% for food items), and establishing a compliant archiving process.

LuniOps includes building blocks for structured e-invoices, regional tax rates, and traceable archiving processes. Mandatory fields, recipient requirements, and tax details should be checked before production use.

The eInvoice mandate is not just a compliance burden — it is an opportunity to digitize and streamline your entire invoicing workflow. Businesses that adopt early gain efficiency advantages over competitors still relying on manual processes.