ZUGFeRD: the new standard for electronic invoices
PDF/A-3 as the preferred ZUGFeRD format
The Central User Guidelines of the Electronic Billing Forum of Germany - best known by its acronym ZUGFeRD, which resembles and is pronounced like the German word for a draft horse - describe a new document and file format for the exchange of electronic invoices. The initiators' goal is to establish a new standard for billing that will be published as a national norm in Germany and then submitted to the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). PDF is playing a key role in this program, especially since the visual depiction of the billing data is generated using a PDF/A-3 document, with an invoice data file in XML format embedded within it at the same time.
