E-Invoicing for Authorities & Businesses: EN 16931, Peppol, XRechnung & ZUGFeRD with PlainStaff

An e-invoice is not a PDF sent by email – it is a structured data set the recipient's accounting software reads automatically. The common basis across Europe is the EN 16931 norm; countries extend it with their own profiles and transmission channels – Germany with XRechnung and ZUGFeRD, France with Factur-X, large parts of the EU with Peppol BIS. This is exactly where PlainStaff steps in:

• Five profiles, one workflow: EN 16931 (CII and UBL), Peppol BIS, Factur-X, XRechnung and ZUGFeRD are produced straight from your project billing – as a hybrid PDF or as an XML file with a readable PDF alongside it.
• Automatic validation: before issuing, PlainStaff checks your invoice against the official rule sets of the selected profile – including national extensions such as the BR-DE rules for XRechnung – and points out missing mandatory fields, with a direct link to the screen where you can fix them.
• Country guidance with sources: for every customer country you see which format is expected there, whether email is enough or a portal is prescribed – with the source and the date of the last review.
• A format per customer: every customer can get their own format – on any plan from the formats of your own country, on the Gold plan from all of them: Peppol BIS for the Belgian customer, Factur-X for the French one, XRechnung for the German one.
• Payment and dunning: due date, payment receipt and dunning level sit in the same list as the invoice – overdue items are flagged, and the reminder is created straight from there with fee, interest and a new deadline.

From creation to payment you stay in control: the invoice archive keeps every e-invoice with status, format, documents, delivery proof, due date and payment state – including reminders and cancellation via an automatically generated credit note.

A single invoice format is enough as long as every customer sits in the same country. The moment you invoice across a border it no longer is: Belgium and the Netherlands run on Peppol, France on Factur-X, and XRechnung is meaningless outside Germany. PlainStaff solves this with a company default profile and a different profile per customer – both on every plan.

What your plan unlocks. Without Gold you get exactly the formats that apply in your own country: Factur-X in France, ZUGFeRD and Peppol BIS in Austria, Peppol BIS in the Netherlands, XRechnung and ZUGFeRD in Germany. Gold is what you need once you want to bill customers in other countries in their format – then every profile is open.

Country guidance right in the customer record. For your customer's country PlainStaff shows which format is customary there, whether the customer is a public authority, a business or a private person – and names the source and the date of the last review for every recommendation. One click applies the recommended format; nothing is ever changed automatically.

Honest about delivery: PlainStaff creates the document and sends it by email. For business customers that is enough in most countries. Some countries additionally prescribe a specific transmission channel – the Peppol network, SdI in Italy, KSeF in Poland, Chorus Pro in France, the ZRE and OZG-RE portals for invoices to German authorities. PlainStaff does not serve those channels itself: you upload the finished file to the portal or hand it to your e-invoicing provider. The note in the customer record tells you where this applies – before you issue the invoice.

An invoice is only done when the money has arrived. So PlainStaff does not stop at creating it: dispatch, due date, payment receipt and dunning live in the same list as the invoice itself – no spreadsheet on the side.

A dispatch composer, not a blind send. Once the invoice is created, the email editor opens right next to it: recipients are prefilled from the customer's e-invoice address and can be extended, while subject, body and signature come from an email template – with placeholders for invoice number, date, due date, customer, project and amount. Each customer can have a default template of their own; PDF and XML are attached automatically, and further attachments (PDF, JPG, PNG up to 20 MB) are dropped in by drag and drop.

Due, open, overdue. The archive carries the due date for every invoice and flags overdue items together with the number of days they are late. When a customer pays, you mark the invoice as paid – and you can take that back just as easily. The payment state is a column of its own next to the dispatch status, and the filters open, paid, reminded and overdue show you in two clicks who needs chasing.

Dunning in three levels. A payment reminder, a second and a final reminder are created straight from the invoice: with a dunning fee, default interest and a new payment deadline, whose total is shown before you create it. The reminder is rendered as a PDF on your own letterhead in the customer's language, filed in the archive and, if you want, mailed out right away. Levels cannot be skipped, paid or cancelled invoices cannot be dunned at all – and from then on the new deadline from the latest reminder is the due date that counts.