E-invoicing at the estate: what trade and restaurants now expect

This article describes the legal situation in Germany. E-invoicing is being introduced across the EU, but the dates and the mandatory formats differ from one member state to the next — France, Italy and Spain each run their own timetable.

A PDF is not an e-invoice. That is the sentence most misunderstandings hang on — and since 1 January 2025 it is also true in law.

The difference: readable by whom?

A PDF invoice is a picture of an invoice. A person reads it without difficulty; accounting software has to guess. An e-invoice in the sense of the law is a structured data set following the European standard EN 16931 — invoice number, line items, tax rates and amounts are in it as fields, not as pixels.

The recipient has to retype nothing and recognise nothing. That is the whole point.

The three format names you will hear

• XRechnung — pure XML, no visual rendering. The standard for business with German public-sector clients.
• ZUGFeRD (from version 2.0) — a hybrid format: a PDF/A-3 with the XML data embedded in it. The person sees the familiar invoice, the software reads the data. For a medium-sized business usually the most practical option.
• Factur-X — the same thing as ZUGFeRD, with a French name. The two formats are technically congruent; whoever can do ZUGFeRD can also supply France.

All three satisfy EN 16931. Which one you use depends on the recipient — and a system that issues invoices should handle all three without anyone having to think about it.

The deadlines, in order

Since 1 January 2025 every domestic business has to be able to receive e-invoices. No transitional period, no turnover threshold. In practice that means: an email address that accepts them, and the ability to process and retain the data set.

Sending is staggered:

• Until the end of 2026 you may continue to send paper or a plain PDF in domestic B2B — provided the recipient agrees.
• From 1 January 2027 businesses with more than €800,000 of prior-year turnover have to issue e-invoices.
• From 1 January 2028 the obligation applies to everyone.

For many wine estates that means: not yet in 2027, definitely in 2028.

Why this becomes relevant earlier than the deadlines say

The deadline says when you have to. The trade says when you should. Large buyers — retail chains, restaurant groups, caterers, public-sector clients — converted their incoming invoice processing long ago and increasingly accept nothing else. Send them a PDF invoice and you get it back, or you wait for your money.

Selling to end customers at the gate is not affected — the obligation applies to turnover between businesses. Anyone selling only direct has time. Anyone supplying restaurants and trade does not.

Retention: eight years, and it is the data set

What has to be retained is the structured part of the invoice, not the printout. A printout of the PDF view is not enough — the XML data has to be preserved unaltered and remain machine-readable. That is less dramatic than it sounds, but it does rule out the folder on the shelf as the only solution.

What an estate should practically do

1. Sort out receiving. Can you accept and process e-invoices? That has applied since 2025 and is readily overlooked, because everybody thinks about sending.
2. Tidy up your master data. E-invoices are strict: a missing tax number, unclear units, imprecise item descriptions all lead to rejection. Whoever has clean item master data has done half the work.
3. Do not wait for an add-on module. E-invoicing is no longer a special case but the normal form. A system that sells it as a surcharge is selling you the normal case twice.

The best state is the one in which the question no longer arises: you write an invoice, and it is an e-invoice out of the box — in the format the recipient understands.