FlowSentricE-invoicing in Germany: ZUGFeRD, XRechnung and DATEV inside an AI agent
Since 2025 German businesses must accept e-invoices. What ZUGFeRD and XRechnung are, why DATEV export matters, and how an agent reads, validates and books invoices.
- Since 1 January 2025 every German business must be able to receive EN 16931 e-invoices. A PDF in an email doesn't count.
- FlowSentric adds e-invoicing as agent tools: read and validate, generate, check VAT IDs, export to DATEV.
- All of the German business tools are on the Free plan too.
Germany's e-invoicing obligation started on 1 January 2025. Every business must be able to receive structured electronic invoices, and the duty to issue them phases in over the following years. "Structured" means machine-readable XML following the EN 16931 standard. A PDF attached to an email doesn't count, however nicely it's formatted. Two formats dominate.
ZUGFeRD and XRechnung, one paragraph each
ZUGFeRD (the German profile of Factur-X) is a hybrid: a normal PDF/A-3 that a human can read, with the EN 16931 XML embedded inside it. Your customer opens the PDF; their accounting software reads the XML.
XRechnung is pure XML (UBL 2.1 or CII) and the mandatory format for invoices to German public authorities. No PDF, just data, usually delivered through a portal or by email.
The four tools FlowSentric ships
Rather than building a separate invoicing product, we added e-invoicing as agent tools. The same agent that answers your questions can process documents:
- E-invoice: read and validate an incoming ZUGFeRD or XRechnung file, or generate one from structured data.
- VAT-ID check: verify a customer's USt-IdNr against the EU VIES service before you invoice reverse-charge; the BZSt confirmation adds the German qualified confirmation.
- DATEV export: write a DATEV Buchungsstapel file that your tax advisor imports directly.
- Document extraction: pull structured data from a scanned receipt or an old-style PDF invoice.
Two more tools round out the German public-data set: a Handelsregister lookup for the commercial register, and government open data from bund.dev.
A worked example: incoming invoices
- A workflow triggers on new mail with attachments (Gmail or Outlook integration).
- The e-invoice tool validates each attachment: is it a valid EN 16931 invoice, which profile, does the total add up?
- For a plain PDF, document extraction pulls the vendor, amounts, VAT rate and IBAN into structured data.
- Privacy Guard masks the IBAN and any personal names before the model summarises the batch.
- An approval step shows you the list. You approve, or you don't.
- The DATEV export writes the Buchungsstapel, a save-to-file step stores it, and Slack gets a summary.
Outgoing invoices, without leaving the workspace
Give an agent your line items and customer data, or let it read them from a project, and the e-invoice tool generates a ZUGFeRD PDF for a business customer or an XRechnung XML for a public authority. Validate the customer's VAT ID first with the VAT-ID check. If you prefer a dedicated app, FlowDocs wraps the same capability in a guided invoice generator with SKR03 bookkeeping export.
Compliance notes
An e-invoice is a tax document: keep the original file, keep the validation result, and keep your approval trail. Our execution traces and audit log cover the last two; your DMS or Files vault covers the first. Rules and deadlines change. This article describes the tooling, not your tax obligations, so confirm the current schedule with your Steuerberater.
All 34 tool types are listed on the AI Tools page.
