Electronic Invoices

An e-invoice must be distinguished not only from a paper invoice but also from a digital invoice, e.g. in PDF format. General information and more detailed specifications on the criteria an e-invoice must meet can be found on the E-Rechnungs-Portal RLP.

To be able to use the ZRE, you must register here – except when sending via Peppol. Registration is done with the help of “Mein Unternehmenskonto” (“My Business Account”) based on ELSTER. You can find more detailed information here. Please feel free to ask your system provider proactively whether sending via Peppol is already possible.

Email: Invoices by email must ALWAYS be sent to the following email address: ZRE-rlp@Poststelle.rlp.de

If you submit an invoice by email, you must first have registered with the ZRE and thereby have stored an email address in your ZRE user account. Submission by email may then also be made from a different email address. The ZRE does not check whether the two email addresses match. The ZRE’s feedback is always sent to the email address from which the invoice is submitted – both in case of rejection and in case of successful delivery. Therefore, please do not submit invoices from a no-reply or bounce email address. If you send invoices via a service provider or software provider, make sure that you know the sender address.

Upload: Anyone who wants to upload an invoice in the ZRE themselves must be registered with the ZRE (Important when registering: the exact sender email address must be stored here) and logged in. After a successful login, the upload option is offered. Error messages and confirmation appear directly in the browser.

Web form: Anyone who is registered (Important when registering: the exact sender email address must be stored here) and logged in also has the option of creating an invoice in the web form. This option involves manual effort and is intended more for uncomplicated invoices. The invoice is not archived in the portal, so you must download it using the download button before you send it.

Peppol: Peppol is the only transmission channel that does not require invoice issuers to register. As an invoice issuer, you receive feedback from Peppol when the invoice can be processed by Peppol. You currently do not receive automated feedback from the ZRE. However, if the ZRE rejects the invoice, e.g. because “BT-10” is not filled with a correct Leitweg-ID, feedback is sent to the email address stored in the invoice in field BT-43 (Seller contact email address). This email address must not be a no-reply, bounce or any other email address that cannot receive replies. Otherwise, it is not possible to contact you.

To use Peppol, you need a service provider listed in the Peppol network. An overview is available here. If you submit invoices via a service provider or software provider, they can help you with questions about Peppol if necessary. Further information can be found in the FAQs or at OpenPeppol.

Reminders and other correspondence: Since the ZRE only processes e-invoices (including, e.g., partial invoices, corrections and credit notes), you must send reminders and other correspondence to the buyer’s email address (not to ZRE-rlp@Poststelle.rlp.de, but, e.g., to the email address stored in “BT-58” of the invoice).

Invoice formats & supporting documents: You can submit invoices that comply with the currently valid version of the XRechnung standard. In addition, the ZRE currently processes the most recently withdrawn version of the standard. ZUGFeRD invoices in the XRechnung profile and in the EN 16931 profile can also be submitted; other ZUGFeRD profiles are not accepted (https://e-rechnung.service.rlp.de/informationen-fuer-rechnungssteller/einreichung-e-rechnung-was-zu-beachten-ist). Such a ZUGFeRD invoice consists of a PDF with an embedded XML file. Please note that the ZRE discards the PDF and creates its own visualisation from the XML file, which contains the relevant original invoice.

Supporting documents must be Base64-encoded and can be added to the e-invoice in the following formats: PDF, PNG, JPG, JPEG, CSV, XLSX, ODS. All attachments must have different names. This also applies to embedded, Base64-encoded attachments within the e-invoice. File names must not contain an @ character and are truncated if they are too long. Only one invoice may be submitted per email; the total size including all attachments must not exceed 20 MB. For more detailed information on what else you should note when submitting, see here.

Content of the e-invoice (“BT fields”): The mandatory fields of the XRechnung standard – the standard that, according to the resolution of the IT Planning Council, is generally authoritative for the use of e-invoices in Germany – result in most cases from the German VAT Act (Umsatzsteuergesetz). Additional mandatory details are payment terms, bank details, the email address of the invoice issuer (“BT-43”, important for feedback) and the Leitweg-ID, the correct entry of which is essential for the correct delivery of the invoice. You can find our Leitweg-ID below. Please make sure it is entered without spaces and in UTF-8 character encoding in field “BT-10”. “BT” stands for “Business Term” and denotes an information element. For detailed information, see the specification of the Coordination Office for IT Standards (KoSIT).

In addition to the mandatory fields, please fill in the following BT fields in every invoice, if this information is available:

The central Leitweg-ID for all offices of the Koblenz city administration is:

071110000000-001-50

The Peppol ID for all offices of the Koblenz city administration is:

0204:071110000000-001-50

The municipal enterprises (Eigenbetriebe) have their own accounting and therefore have both their own Leitweg-IDs and their own Peppol IDs. Where possible, please address matters for the following institutions directly to these numbers:

The Peppol IDs of our municipal enterprises result from the prefix “0204:” followed by the Leitweg-ID given above.