eInvoice Mandate 2025: How to Prepare Your Wholesale Business
Germany's eInvoice mandate is here. Learn about ZUGFeRD and XRechnung formats and what food wholesalers need to do to comply.
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 supports eInvoicing natively. Invoices are generated with proper ZUGFeRD-compliant structure, tax rates are configured per product category (with automatic reduced rates for food items), and all invoices are archived in a GoBD-compliant manner. The system also handles the complexity of multi-region invoicing — so businesses operating in both Germany and Turkey can manage both MwSt and KDV from one platform.
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.