Summary of the previous episode: on March 26th 2016, Akretion announced the support of the generation and import of ZUGFeRD electronic invoices, which is the German standard for electronic invoices. A ZUGFeRD invoice is a PDF invoice with an embedded XML file in Cross Industry Invoice (CII) format. Please read the previous blog post for more details and watch the screencast.
Today, Akretion announces the support of the import of e-fff invoices, which is the Belgian standard for electronic invoices. The technical approach of the e-fff standard is diametrically opposed to the technical approach of the ZUGFeRD standard: an e-fff invoice is an XML file (in UBL format) that embeds the PDF invoice, whereas the ZUGFeRD format is a PDF invoice that embeds an XML file (in CII format). So, if a company sends an e-fff invoice to a customer, as they cannot be sure that their customer has a modern accounting software such as Odoo able to read and import e-fff invoices, they will probably send both the XML invoice in e-fff format and the regular PDF invoice (which means sending an e-mail with 2 attachments). But the benefit is the same: the customer will be able to reliably import this electronic invoice in his accounting software in a few clicks: no more manual encoding of the supplier invoice… accountants should save a lot of time !
To get this new feature on your Odoo version 8, you need to install the module account_invoice_import_ubl. This module is available on the github project of the Odoo Community Association (OCA) in this pull request. It requires some additional modules that are available in the main 8.0 branch of the partner-contact OCA project (for the module base_vat_sanitized) and in the community-data-files OCA project (for the modules that add the UNECE nomenclature on taxes, unit of measures and payment modes).
Once the module is installed, in order to be able to import an e-fff invoice of a supplier, you need to:
- make sure that you have configured the VAT number of that supplier in Odoo,
- on the supplier form, in the Accounting tab, create an Invoice Import Configuration (for the parameter Method for Invoice Line, select Multi-line no product to start)
- in the menu Accounting > Configuration > Taxes > Taxes, you should at least configure the purchase VAT taxes that are used by your supplier ; you should set the UNECE Tax Type (select [VAT] Value added tax) and the UNECE Tax Category (select [S] Standard rate for a regular VAT tax).
Then you can import the e-fff invoice via the menu Accounting > Suppliers > Import Invoice: select the XML file corresponding to the e-fff invoice and click on the Import button. Odoo will create the draft supplier invoice and will attach both the XML file and the embedded PDF file to this invoice.
If you want to test this module but you don’t have an e-fff invoice, you can use the e-fff invoice of the automated test suite of the module (download it here). If you have a demo database, you can import it immediately because the corresponding supplier and the 21% purchase VAT tax are already created via the demo data of the module.
We hope that the Belgian members of the Odoo community will enjoy this contribution of Akretion ! I would like to thank the Belgian member of the Odoo community that sent us some real e-fff invoices to test this development. Don’t hesitate to contact Akretion if you are interested by our work on electronic invoicing or if you require some additional development on e-fff invoices.
