Free and open source tool chain for generating EN16931 conforming invoices (Factur-X/ZUGFeRD, UBL, CII, XRechnung) from popular spreadsheet formats or JSON.
You can currently create invoices in these formats:
CII
: customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017
Factur-X-Minimum
customization idurn:factur-x.eu:1p0:minimum
Factur-X-BasicWL
customization idurn:factur-x.eu:1p0:basicwl
Factur-X-Basic-WL
is an alias forFactur-X-BasicWL
Factur-X-Basic
customization id'urn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:factur-x.eu:1p0:basic'
Factur-X-EN16931
customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017
Factur-X-Comfort
is an alias forFactur-X-EN16931
Factur-X-Extended
customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#conformant#urn:factur-x.eu:1p0:extended
Factur-X-XRechung
customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:xeinkauf.de:kosit:xrechnung_3.0
UBL
: customization customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017
XRECHNUNG-CII
: customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:xeinkauf.de:kosit:xrechnung_3.0
XRECHNUNG-UBL
: customization idurn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:xeinkauf.de:kosit:xrechnung_3.0
ZUGFeRD-Minimum
is an alias forFactur-X-Minimum
ZUGFeRD-BasicWL
is an alias forFactur-X-BasicWL
ZUGFeRD-Basic-WL
is an alias forFactur-X-BasicWL
ZUGFeRD-Basic
is an alias forFactur-X-Basic
ZUGFeRD-EN16931
is an alias forFactur-X-EN16931
ZUGFeRD-Comfort
is an alias forFactur-X-EN16931
ZUGFeRD-Extended
is an alias forFactur-X-Extended
ZUGFeRD-XRechung
is an alias forFactur-X-XRechnung
Case does not matter, when you specify a format.
The only way to use the software is to run the server providing the REST API and sending requests to the server.
This may eventually change in the future, when a commandline interface will be added.
The service in its current state is meant to be run in a network with limited access or behind an API gateway that prevents abuse of the service.
One simple solution is to use ngninx
as a
gateway and configure rate-limiting there. You will also want to limit
the maximum request body size.
This repository is an attempt to aid small businesses, especially in France and Germany but also in other parts of the European Union to create electronic invoices conforming with EN16931 with only free and open-source software.
It is quite unlikely that you can use anything here out of the box. See it as a starter template for your own solution.
See the E-Invoice-EU online documentation.
The blog post Creating E-Invoices with Free and Open Source Software or the German version Elektronische Rechnungen mit freier und quelloffener Software erzeugen also provides in-depth information using a gentler approach!
You can achieve similar results with these projects:
- Factur-X extension for LibreOffice is a LibreOffice extension to generate Factur-X invoices from LibreOffice Calc published under the GPL licence with a video tutorial. It is maybe less flexible but easier to set up.
- NodeJS 17 or newer (currently tested with NodeJS 18, 20, and 22)
- A package manager like bun, npm, yarn, pnpm, ...
$ bun install
This may warn about "husky" missing. Just run bun install
again in order
to fix this.
If you do not like bun
, replace it with npm
, yarn
, pnpm
or whatever
is currently hyped.
# development
$ bun run start
# watch mode
$ bun run start:dev
# production mode
$ bun run start:prod
# unit tests
$ bun run test
# e2e tests
$ bun run test:e2e
# test coverage
$ bun run test:cov
By far the easiest way is to run the application in a software container.
Pull the Docker image:
$ docker pull gflohr/e-invoice-eu:latest
Run the container:
$ docker run --rm -d -p 3000:3000 --name e-invoice-eu gflohr/e-invoice-eu:1.0.0
If you want to debug issues, omit the option -d
so that you can see the
output of the application running inside of the container.
Access the application from your host computer:
$ curl http://localhost:3000/api/format/list
Or you can see the OpenAPI/Swagger documentation:
curl http://localhost:3000/api
It probably makes more sense to open that URL in the browser.
See the documentation for information how to create e-invoices with the API.
Please report bugs at https://github.com/gflohr/e-invoice-eu/issues.
The Factur-X resp. ZUGFeRD standard requires PDF/A compliance for the PDF that the invoice is wrapped in. Please search the internet if you do not know what PDF/A means.
This library creates PDFs solely with pdf-lib
and does some pretty complicated transformations on the PDF to achieve PDF/A
compliance. This is not battle tested and may fail.
If you encounter a PDF that does not meet the PDF/A requirements, please open an issue and attach an anonymized version of the PDF. What you can do in the meantime:
- If you have GhostScript installed, convert the PDF to PDF/A with this command:
gs -dVERBOSE -dPDFA=3 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=OUTPUT_FILE.pdf PDFA_def.ps INPUT_FILE.pdf
- Try to create the PDF again with LibreOffice.
- If the normal settings in LibreOffice do not work, enable PDF/A support (in the General section of the PDF options).
- If you want to automate the process, you can start LibreOffice in headless mode on the commandline:
libreoffice --headless "-env:UserInstallation=file:///tmp/LibreOffice_Conversion_${USER}" --convert-to 'pdf:writer_pdf_Export:{"SelectPdfVersion":{"type":"long","value":"3"}}' SOURCE_FILE.ods
On Un*x systems, libreoffice
should be in your $PATH
. On MacOS, you will
find it under /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice
. On
MS Windows, it is probably somewhere like C:\\Program Files\\LibreOffice\\libreoffice.exe
(corrections are welcome).
This is free software available under the terms of the WTFPL.
This free software has been written with the greatest possible care, but like all software it may contain errors. Use at your own risk! There is no warranty and no liability.