On July 28th 2017, Akretion announced the support of the generation of Factur-X invoices in Odoo, only 3 weeks after the publication of the beta version of the Factur-X standard. This was the first implementation of the Factur-X standard in an ERP.
Factur-X is the e-invoicing standard for France and Germany. It is published by the FNFE-MPE (Forum National de la Facture Electronique et des Marchés Publics Electroniques) and its German counterpart FeRD (Forum elektronische Rechnung Deutschland). A Factur-X invoice is a PDF invoice with an embedded XML file in Cross Industry Invoice format. The embedded XML file is the machine-readable equivalent of the printable invoice.
At Akretion, we are very enthousiastic about the new possibilities allowed by electronic invoices. We would love to see this standard implemented as widely as possible. In particular, we would love to receive Factur-X invoices from our suppliers, so that we will be able to import them in our ERP automatically, without any manual work ! In order to boost the adoption of this new standard by French and German companies, Akretion is proud to publish today an opensource Python library called factur-x. This library will make it very easy for other Python invoicing software to generate Factur-X invoices. In one single API call, this library is able to generate a Factur-X PDF invoice from a regular PDF invoice and a Factur-X XML file. It also has other interesting features such as validating a Factur-X XML file against the official Factur-X XML Schema Definition (XSD), extracting the XML file from a Factur-X PDF invoice, etc.
In order to have the widest possible adoption of this Factur-X library, we decided to publish it under the BSD licence, which is one of the most permissive OSI-approved licence. This licence allows the use of the Factur-X library in opensource and proprietary software without restriction.
This library is available on pypi, the main repository for opensource Python libraries. The source code is hosted on Akretion’s Github repository. The Odoo modules account_invoice_factur-x which generate Factur-X invoices and account_invoice_import_factur-x which imports Factur-X invoices are the first to use this library (they are available here for Odoo version 10). We hope that other ERP and invoicing software will adopt it very soon !
