ZUGFeRD 2.2 import for Dynamics 365 for Finance

ZUGFeRD (Zentraler User Guide des Forums elektronische Rechnung Deutschland) is an e-invoicing format combining a human-readable PDF/A-3 and an embedded XML file using the CII (Cross-Industry Invoice) syntax. The CII syntax may also be used in the xRechnung, which is a pure XML version of the German e-Invoice. From 2025, the ability to receive and process electronic invoices becomes mandatory for B2B transactions in Germany.

Microsoft’s current solution in Dynamics 365 for Finance provides support specifically for the UBL (Universal Business Language) format of the xRechnung: Import vendor electronic invoices – Finance | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn. It enables the import of vendor invoices received in this format, mapping them as pending vendor invoices in D365. The invoice may be uploaded directly into the system or placed in a SharePoint folder for unattended processing.

We are happy to announce the release of the CII (Cross-Industry Invoice) dialect of the xRechnung / ZUGFeRD electronic invoice. This solution is implemented via Electronic Reporting (ER) configurations, which means it does not require any customisations and can be easily installed across all active versions of D365. It sits on top of the standard Invoice model v280, Vendor Invoice Mapping to Destination v280.46, side by side with the configuration Vendor Invoice Import v280.7.

The functionality aligns with the standard Microsoft UBL import, utilizing the key data elements for processing and ensuring PO matching:

Header: Invoice ID, Invoice date, Due date, Vendor ID, Currency code, and a header-level note.
Lines: Line number, Item ID, Quantity, Sales unit of measure, Sales price, Discount (percentage discounts are converted to absolute values as the XML schema doesn’t support percentages), Price unit, Name, Description, and Line amount (excluding VAT).

The solution supports the ZUGFeRD 2.2/Factur-X 1.0 profile EN 16931, also known as the “COMFORT” profile (being also a subset of the EXTENDED profile), which meets all tax law requirements and must be accepted by customers unless explicitly denied.

Price

The solution is offered at a fixed fee per end customer / D365 tenant:

Version	Price	Deliverables	Notes
Light	€890	The Vendor invoice import CII Electronic Reporting configuration	This option does not require any X++ customisations or 3rd party software and can be installed and used right away.
Light+	€1200	Same as the Light version but with 5 hours of prepaid support and installation

Your can acquire the solution on the official Microsoft AppSource marketplace: ZUGFeRD CII import (microsoft.com)

Setup and use

Follow the steps outlined in the Microsoft’s guidance Import vendor electronic invoices – Finance | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn:
Import the same three configurations from Microsoft (Prerequisites);
Import the configuration Vendor invoice import CII.xml provided to you;
Open Accounts payable > Setup > Accounts payable parameters; on the Electronic documents tab, select the imported Vendor invoice import CII format.
To run either one of the formats – UBL or CII – by choice, you may download and import a complimentary X++ extension with an additional parameter CII vendor invoice and an own menu item underneath the standard one: VendImportInvoice_CII.axpp. In the batch execution mode this does not matter, because each of the formats becomes its own Electronic source with a set of SharePoint folders etc.
Prepare the master data: make sure the vendors are stored with proper VAT numbers in Dynamics 365 for Finance.
Make sure that the vendor’s external item ID mapping exists. Any Buyer Assigned ID (our item number) potentially sent by the vendor is neglected by the Microsoft’s mapping, and the conversion to the internal Item ID is always handled via the external item IDs. Under these conditions, the import works as expected and the PO lines may be matched.
Make sure that the units of measure are properly mapped to the UNECE Recommendation No. 20 list called “Codes for Units of Measure Used in International Trade”. E.q. the UNECE unit H87 must be mapped to either PCS or EA or STK.
Perform an interactive test upload by using the function Accounts payable > Periodic tasks > Import vendor invoices (or Import CII vendor invoices if you installed and configured the above extension from step 5). Beware: contrary to the UBL format, the CII (“COMFORT”) invoice does not include any line-by-line reference to the purchase order lines. Just the PO number is sent in the header. We assume that the numeration of the invoice lines mostly follows the PO lines numeration. If not, the standard mapping will fall back to the matching by the line purchase price.
Configure the batch mode with Electronic sources as outlined in the guidance at step 1.

Useful links

End user license agreement: ZUGfERD_Import_EULA
You may download sample invoices here: ZUGFeRD 2.3 | Forum elektronische Rechnung Deutschland (ferd-net.de). To extract an XML attachment suitable for the import, you may use Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat.
A rich interactive ZUGFeRD schema navigator is hosted here: EN 16931 – FacturX 1.03 – ZUGFeRD 2.0.1 – COMFORT (gefeg.com)

E-invoice and configurable business documents blog series

Production order should not get Released on material shortage

Update 27.08.2024: The below issue has ultimately been solved by Microsoft in Update 38, see What’s new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 10.0.38 (February 2024) – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn. The feature “Prevent production orders to be released when full material is not available” is described as follows: “Fixes an issue where the production control parameter Requirement for material reservation is set to Require full reservation. Previously, when a production order was released while this option was selected, its status was always changed from Scheduled to Released, even if all material couldn’t be fully reserved. When this feature is enabled, when a production order is released with this option selected, the production order will only change status once all material is fully available for reservation.”

There is an evergreen issue in Dynamics 365 material reservation for production: despite the policy “Require full reservation“, the production order is released even if there is a shortage of materials:

The issue is very well known, I have been combating it since 2018. It has been reported to Microsoft on numerous occasions by my colleagues around the world: Production order should not get status Released if raw material release to warehouse fails.

The consequences are dire. A released order’s jobs will appear on the Shop floor control terminal and animate the worker to start the order. In the course of the assembly the worker is going to be forced to interrupt his/her work and fetch the parts from the warehouse. Later, at the report as finished / material backflushing stage at the Production floor terminal, it is going to prevent the online material consumption if the backflushing principle is set to Finish.

Apparently, the BOM line and the warehouse work generation are not in the same transaction scope as the overall production order release. Indeed, the ProdWHSRelease call is performed outside of the ttsbegin/ttscommit pair in ProdUpdRelease

Since Microsoft refuses to fix this problem, let me publish a programmatic solution. We put the ProdWHSRelease call into the endUpdateProduction() method if the order requires full reservation. Then we prevent the execution of ProdWHSRelease for the second time by temporarily changing one parameter and then reverting it back:

DontReleaseOnMaterialShortage.axpp

				
					                ttscommit;
                this.printout();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception::Deadlock)
        {
            retry;
        }
...
        prodTable.reread();
        if (ProdParametersDim::find(prodTable.InventDimId).ProductionLineRelease == WHSProductionLineRelease::OnProdOrderRelease)
        {
            ProdWHSRelease::newFromProdParmRelease(prodParmRelease).whsReleaseSingleOrder(prodTable);
        }

Production and Manufacturing blog series

ZUGFeRD 2.2/ Factur-X 1.0 for Dynamics 365 FO

We are excited to announce the release of the common German-French electronic invoice ZUGFeRD / Factur-X in Dynamics 365 for Finance and SCM. This plug-and-play solution in its “Light” version does not require any customisation and can be easily installed in the standard Electronic Reporting module of D365. It supports the ZUGFeRD 2.2/Factur-X 1.0 profile EN 16931, also known as the “COMFORT” profile, which meets all tax law requirements and must be accepted by customers unless explicitly denied.

In the ZUGFeRD/Factur-X standard, the invoicing information is included in an XML payload attached to a human-readable PDF file (see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZUGFeRD). This is in contrast to the Italian electronic invoicing system, where a PDF is embedded in a Base64 encoded block within an XML. The PDF document is just a visualisation of the electronic content, what counts is the XML attachment. The XML file is always named factur-x.xml and it is attached to at the PDF document level, not to a single PDF page:

Here is an example: factur-x.xml

Our solution, which utilizes Configurable business documents in D365, supports Sales invoices with separate buyer, seller, and order accounts. Other types of invoices such as the Free text invoice or any of the 3 Project invoices, can be provided upon request at a discounted price. Our solution also handles form notes, line and header notes and footers, line discounts, total discounts, and cash discounts, document level charges, properly reflecting VAT for domestic, EU, and export sales. The settlement instructions orchestrate a SEPA credit transfer or a SEPA direct debit withdrawal; partially prepaid invoices are properly interpreted. The solution is available in French, German, and British English.

Price

The solution is offered at a fixed fee per end customer / D365 tenant:

Version	Price	Deliverables	Notes
Light	€890	A ZUGFeRD Sales invoice ER configuration, the XML file only	This option does not require any X++ customisations or 3rd party software and can be installed and used right away.
Light+	€1200	Same as the Light version but with 5 hours of prepaid support and installation
Heavy	€2200	Contains the full solution, including a PDF template, and a PDF post-processor with 8 hours of prepaid support.	Includes the iTextSharp 5.5.13.2 .NET library under the GNU Affero General Public License Includes the BouncyCastle 1.8.9 .NET cryptographic library under a variant of the MIT license.

You may acquire the solution on the official Microsoft App Source portal: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dynamics-365-for-operations/er-consultgmbh1674479095356.zugferd_light_plus

Setup and use

Import the Electronic configuration “ZUGFeRD Sales invoice” provided to you (Organisation administration > Electronic reporting > Configurations, button Exchange / Load from XML file). For the ease of installation, configuration and integration, the standard Invoice model Invoice model v 277 and the standard Invoice model mapping 277.258 are used, make sure they have been imported upfront.
Beware: the standard Invoice model mapping from Microsoft has a number of shortcomings. For instance, the buyer and seller addresses are passed in a de-normalized form as multi line strings. As a walkaround, some heuristics and regular expressions have been applied to extract the ISO2 code of the country and the zip (postal) code. A well-known modification to the standard Invoice model mapping will fix that and reinforce the report. Futhermore, the current Microsoft Invoice model mapping does not pass the EU Tax directives to the report. At the moment, the report relies on the non-EU Tax exempt codes in the same way as the standard Excel invoice does. To leverage the Tax directives, fix the model mapping, then modify the ZipFolder/InvoicePDF/SalesTax/SalesTax* mappings in ZUGFeRD Sales invoice format like this:
IF(OR(@.Value.TaxExemptDescription<>"",@.Value.TaxDirective<>""), IF(@.Value.TaxExemptDescription<>"",@.Value.TaxExemptDescription,@.Value.TaxDirective), @"GER_LABEL:PlusVAT")
Under the button Configurations / Application specific parameters / Setup, provide a mapping of the VAT (en-us: Sales tax) Print codes to the ZUGFeRD categories S, K, AE, G, O (for example, the 19% and 7% VAT belong to the “S” category). Also provide a mapping of the D365 Unit of measure codes to the UNECE Recommendation No. 20 list called “Codes for Units of Measure Used in International Trade” (see https://tfig.unece.org/contents/recommendation-20.htm). For instance, a piece has the standard code H87. A sample parameter setup can be downloaded here: 03-01-2023 03.29.45 pm_ZUGFeRD Sales invoice.277.11
Pay attention to the sample VAT print codes on the screenshot above: the standard Invoice model mapping does not pass the tax rates to the report, and the VAT Print code must contain the VAT rate in numbers, if applicable. In other words, they should look like “19%” and “7%” in Germany or “20%” and “5,5%”in France. The mapping of the sales units of measure is against the language-specific, translated unit code (if exists), not the UoM symbol used in D365 globally, i.e. not pcs but Stk. Beware: these symbolic “print codes” persist in the tax transactions and invoice lines along with the VAT codes, i.e. they are historized and must be set correctly from the beginning. Once both the mappings have been established, set the Application specific parameters State to Completed.
Open Sales ledger (en-us: Accounts receivable) > Setup > Forms > Form setup. Make sure that the VAT specification option is set to Registration currency. You will also probably Print VAT number on invoice, show some invoice line inventory dimensions and/or notes, and display external item numbers (Item number in forms = Both).
Finally, open Print management and select the Report format = ZUGFeRD Sales invoice at the Customer invoice node. The Light version setup ends here.
For the Heavy version, first deploy the X++ customisations and libraries from a D365 deployable package provided to you.
Create a new File document type in the Organisation administration > Document management > Document types list. Name it exactly like this: ZUGFeRD.
Create a new ER destination (Organisation administration > Electronic reporting > Electronic reporting destination) for the report ZUGFeRD Sales invoice. Under File destination, add a new line and divert the ZipFolder file component to the Archive: click Settings, then Archive, set Enabled and Save in job archive, and choose file Type = ZUGFeRD. The Archive destination is namely the only one to plug in/subscribe to.
Make sure that the feature Configure action-dependent ER destinations is turned OFF: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/analytics/er-action-dependent-destinations. It doesn’t work well anyway.
The steps to configure the Heavy version end here. The Electronic Reporting engine will fill out the PDF form, populate an XML file and put both into a ZIP (i.e. a folder). This ZIP file is intercepted, unpacked, and the XML part is embedded into the PDF, adding some links and attributes required. The resulting PDF is rendered on the screen in a separate browser window. Other output destinations than the Screen may be offered upon request at a discounted price. The PDF file is not fully PDF-A/3 compliant, but it can be read and parsed, the XML payload passes all validations. Please bear in mind that PDF forms never contain repeatable ranges or cells. This is the reason why the number of invoice lines is currently limited by 10, this number will be extended on demand; see also Design ER configurations to fill in PDF templates – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn.
Print or reprint an invoice with the option Use print management turned on.
The resulting PDF document is displayed on the screen (the Light version offers an XML file to download). Here is a sample, you buy what you see:

Useful links

End user license agreement: ZUGfERD_Heavy_EULA
The PDF / XML validator is available online at Factur-X Validator (fnfe-mpe.org).
A rich interactive ZUGFeRD schema navigator is hosted here: EN 16931 – FacturX 1.03 – ZUGFeRD 2.0.1 – COMFORT (gefeg.com)

Dynamics 365 for Operations

ZUGFeRD 2.2 import for Dynamics 365 for Finance

ZUGFeRD 2.2 import for Dynamics 365 for Finance

Setup and use

Useful links

E-invoice and configurable business documents blog series

Production order should not get Released on material shortage

Production order should not get Released on material shortage

Production and Manufacturing blog series

ZUGFeRD 2.2/ Factur-X 1.0 for Dynamics 365 FO

ZUGFeRD 2.2/ Factur-X 1.0 for Dynamics 365 FO

Price

Setup and use

Useful links

E-invoice and configurable business documents blog series