E-Rechnung Archivierung: what must survive, and in what form

Under § 14b UStG, a business keeps a duplicate of every invoice it issued and every invoice it received for eight years, the period starting at the end of the calendar year in which the invoice was issued. The duty covers both directions of your invoicing and applies regardless of format; what the e-invoice changes is what "keeping the invoice" means, because the invoice is now a data record.

The operative standard is the GoBD, the BMF’s principles for keeping books and records in electronic form, issued November 28, 2019 and amended most recently on July 14, 2025 precisely to accommodate the mandatory e-invoice. The amended text is explicit: of an e-invoice, at least the structured part must be preserved so that it exists unaltered in its original form. The BMF FAQ says the same. A rendering, a printout, or a re-export is not the original.

Four properties, all of them checkable in an audit:

• Unaltered original. The received or issued file itself is what you store; the archive must guarantee the structured part stays byte-true from capture to the end of the retention period.
• Immutability (Unveränderbarkeit). Changes must be impossible or fully logged. A shared drive where anyone can overwrite files fails this; a DMS or archive system with versioning and audit trail passes.
• Machine evaluability (maschinelle Auswertbarkeit). Auditors may process your records electronically, so the XML must remain readable as data. Flattening an XRechnung into a PDF or paper destroys exactly the property the format exists for.
• Traceability and documentation. The GoBD expect an orderly, documented process: where invoices enter, how they are captured, who can do what in the archive, laid down in a Verfahrensdokumentation.

§ 14b UStG also regulates geography: a business established in Germany keeps invoices in Germany or, as electronic records with full remote access for the tax authorities, elsewhere in the EU, notifying the tax office where the archive is kept outside Germany. Standard European cloud archives fit this comfortably; sovereignty questions start where storage leaves the EU. The same online-access condition is what makes purely electronic archiving legally equivalent to the filing cabinet.

One boundary is worth drawing honestly: an extraction layer is not an archive. Talonic reads, validates, and structures incoming invoices, and hands your systems schema-validated data with confidence and provenance per field, processed on EU infrastructure in Germany; the audit-proof eight-year retention of the originals belongs in your DMS or ERP archive. The clean architecture keeps both: originals immutable in the archive, extracted data driving the process.

Reading about formats is one thing; an accounts-payable inbox full of them is another. Two free resources and one production path:

• Peppol e-Invoice Extractor: pull the seller, buyer, line items, VAT breakdown, and totals out of an e-invoice, free in the browser
• Peppol e-invoice extraction guide: the EN 16931 field model (Business Terms) explained field by field
• Invoice parsing with schema validation: process XRechnung, ZUGFeRD, Peppol invoices, PDFs, and paper scans into one validated output schema, with confidence and provenance on every value