ZUGFeRD/XRechnung - integration for Bitrix24

About the Client

Our client — a cleaning service provider from Germany — needed to send a high volume of invoices to customers across the country. To streamline their invoice payment workflow, the client asked us to add e-invoicing functionality directly into Bitrix24 Cloud.

Project Goal

German companies use two main e-invoicing formats:

• XRechnung — the official German XML-based electronic invoice standard designed for business-to-government (B2G) and other transactions, fully complying with European standard EN 16931.
• ZUGFeRD — a hybrid e-invoicing standard combining a human-readable PDF with machine-readable XML data. It stands for Zentraler User Guide des Forums elektronische Rechnung Deutschland and complies with European standard EN 16931.

We needed to support both formats to cover all customer types.

The Solution

We created an integration that generates and verifies XML content (in CII or UBL formats) for e-invoicing, with the option to embed this XML directly into the PDF file generated in previous steps using the company template.

On the Bitrix24 side, the integration was delivered as a custom activity that can be added to any automation workflow. Once the file is created, it is attached to a designated field in the invoice item (configured via activity parameters) and can also be saved to Bitrix24 Drive.

During implementation, we also modified the invoicing pipeline to automatically process invoices for private and corporate customers through separate workflows, while adding support for service provision periods inside each invoice.

Key Results & Impact

E-invoice generation and sending now takes just 5–10 seconds per document. Invoice dispatch became fully automated, and overall workflow speed more than doubled.