Factur-X

What the word means

Two ways of sending an invoice have always fought each other. A PDF is easy to read and useless to accounting software, which has to have the figures retyped. A data file is the opposite: software reads it in one go, and nobody can look at it.

Factur-X stops choosing. The document opens as an ordinary invoice, laid out as it always was. Attached inside it, invisible on the page, is the same invoice written out for a machine: the number, the date, the seller, the buyer, each line, each rate of tax, the total. One file satisfies both readers.

What it does on a real document

The invoice examples on this site are built that way. The page carries the letterhead, the table of billed lines and the totals. The attached data says the same amounts again, in the order and under the names the rules give them.

The file itself is a PDF/A, because the third part of that rule is precisely the one that allows a file to travel inside a document. Its identity card also states how much detail the attached data reaches, so the receiving software knows what to expect before opening it.

Where it comes from, and why

The format was worked out jointly by France and Germany and published at the end of the 2010s. Germany already had one of its own, called ZUGFeRD; the two were brought into line, so a file made under one name is read under the other.

Behind both stands a European standard, EN 16931, which fixes what an electronic invoice has to say. France is making it compulsory: from September 2026 every business established there must be able to receive one.

See it on a finished document

A Factur-X electronic invoice A commercial invoice The rules behind this word, and the texts they are read from