7. Incoming invoices

The obligation that already applies

A great deal is written about sending e-invoices and too little about receiving them, although the order is the other way round: being able to receive an e-invoice has been obligatory for every German business since 1 January 2025 — no exceptions, no turnover threshold, small businesses included. The obligation to issue them only begins in 2027 (above 800,000 euro of prior-year turnover) and in 2028 for everybody.

This module is for the side that already applies.

What arrives here

There is a single button for all of it: Upload invoice. Behind it is not a form but a fork in the road.

• An XRechnung or ZUGFeRD file is read. The figures are in the document and nothing is guessed. It is then checked against the official rule set, and you see the result.
• An ordinary PDF or a photograph can only be interpreted. Recognition produces a proposal, and the invoice is explicitly marked "cannot be checked" — because what is not structured cannot be formally validated.

The software does not paper over that difference. An invoice that was read and one that was guessed at look different, because they are differently reliable.

On a phone you can use the camera directly: on mobile devices the button offers it.

The path of an invoice

Draft ──▶ In review ──▶ [First approval ──▶] Approved ──▶ Booked
             └──▶ Rejected ──▶ Draft

Draft — arrived, not yet sent for approval. This is the only state in which an invoice can still be deleted.

In review — somebody has to decide. Who may approve is a permission of its own: entering an invoice and committing the company to paying it are two different things.

Approved — the invoice may be booked.

Booked — a journal entry exists. From here the invoice appears in the VAT return, open items, the BWA, the trial balance and the DATEV export without you doing anything in those places. A booked invoice is no longer deleted; it is cancelled in the bookkeeping.

Rejected — always with a reason. Without one the software will not accept the rejection, because your supplier will ask what was wrong.

Four eyes

Optionally, an invoice above a chosen amount needs two approvals from two different people. This is off by default, because otherwise a one-person business could not approve its own invoices.

What gets checked

Findings appear above the invoice, not below it. Anyone who scrolls past a changed bank account has been failed by the page, not by their attention.

A changed IBAN. If an invoice names an account this supplier has never invoiced from, it is flagged and booking is blocked until somebody confirms the account. Approval is not blocked — the approver is exactly who needs to see the warning. A new supplier's first invoice raises nothing: there is no history for it to contradict.

Only confirm a bank account after you have checked it with the supplier by telephone — on a number you already had, not the one printed on the invoice.

An invalid VAT identification number. Checked against its country's format and, for German numbers, its check digit. "DE123" is not a VAT number.

A foreign account for a domestic supplier. A note, not an accusation.

Rule violations. For structured invoices, the result of the official check. This is not a formality: under the Ministry of Finance letter of 15 October 2025, only a properly formed e-invoice entitles the recipient to deduct input VAT.

Suppliers

The counterpart to Customers. Every supplier has master data, a creditor account and — the actual point — a history of every bank account they have ever invoiced from.

Without that history each invoice would be judged on its own, and that is exactly how redirected payments succeed. Every confirmation and every block is recorded in the activity log with a name and a time.

Suppliers are not created automatically. A creditor list filled from text recognition is unusable within a month; instead the software proposes a match and you confirm it.

The capture log

Every arriving document gets an entry in a running chain, each entry recording the one before it with a checksum. A later change breaks the chain at a point anybody can find.

That is the precondition on which the GoBD permits replacing paper with images: originals may be destroyed after compliant image capture provided the process is demonstrable. Note that a procedural documentation (Verfahrensdokumentation) must also exist before you destroy any originals.

Some documents may never be destroyed, among them annual financial statements, notarised documents and customs papers.

Retention

Invoices must be kept for eight years (§ 14b UStG, § 147 AO), counted from the end of the year in which they were issued. For an e-invoice it is the structured data that counts — the XML file, not the printout. That is exactly what is archived here, unchanged, as it arrived.