The XRechnung format is a E-Government standard for electronic invoicing. At some point it will be mandatory for every company dealing with German governmental partners to send the invoices in this XML format.

Many commercial vendors have already caught up and provide ways to generate XRechnung formatted documents with their software. However, to my knowledge, the availability of open source end user software is very limited. Since the standard itself is at least very open and transparently documented, so I think it is worthwhile to also support it with free software on the desktop.

Kraft, the desktop software for invoicing and efficient office work in the small enterprise, supports export of XRechnung documents since a while.

Over the weekend I created a new little project that adds a viewer for XRechnung documents called xrview.

XRechnung Invoices Viewer

A german city was looking for something to evaluate processes in a Linux- and KDE based productivity work environment.

Technically it is not very sophisticated: It renders the provided XML file using XSL styles officially provided by the Koordinierungsstelle für IT-Standards in a two step process to HTML, which is displayed in a web view. Some values of interest are extracted from the XML and displayed in a detail pane on the left side.

This is just a POC and has to be continued, but the time was good to kickstart this project.

Maybe anybody is interested to create a PR to help to improve digitalization in Germany?