After electronic B2G-invoices became mandatory in 2020 (for guideline 2014/55/EU the CEN standard EN16931 was issued) now the EU is planning in their Vat in the Digital Age (ViDA) draft guideline to also request machine readable copies of all Business-to-Business (B2B) cross border invoices.

Anticipating this change, some countries, like Italy, France and Germany, introduced or are introducing domestic continuous transaction control (CTC) systems requiring short term XML copies of all domestic B2B invoices, replacing paper invoices and PDF invoices without additional XML in the foreseeable future.

This speech will briefly summarize aspects of Italy, cover what is happening in France and focus on the situation in Germany with it's formats Factur-X and XRechnung and dive into open standards (like UBL and UN/CEFACT Cross Industry Invoice=CII as well as Factur-X) as well as open source to view, create, parse, validate and convert electronic invoices.