E-invoicing
The e-invoice changes how an invoice reaches you. About what happens to it afterwards, it changes nothing.
As of: 06.09.2026
An e-invoice is an invoice in a structured electronic format, issued, transmitted and received in a way that allows it to be processed by machine. The format has to comply with the European standard for electronic invoicing.
A PDF attached to an email does not qualify. It is a picture of an invoice, not a data record, and it was therefore never an e-invoice in the sense of this rule, however electronic it feels.
A real e-invoice, conversely, often looks like nothing at all to a person: an XML file in which every field is named, either on its own or embedded in a PDF that is only the readable shell.
The German obligation does not apply to you. It bites only where the supplier and the recipient are both established domestically, and for Germany that means in Germany. An invoice from Vienna to Munich falls outside it, and one from Munich to Vienna equally.
That is relief with an expiry date, not a free pass. The date that matters to you is in the ViDA directive the Council adopted on 11 March 2025: from 1 July 2030, digital reporting requirements apply across the Union to cross-border business-to-business turnovers. Member states running a national reporting system of their own have to align it with the EU model by 1 January 2035.
Until then what applies to you is what always has: an invoice is an invoice, whatever format it arrives in, and it has to be kept in every one of them.
The obligation governs the format and the route. It says nothing about how long you must keep an invoice, and it shortens no period.
The period is the same as before, it sits in the same provisions as before, and it still starts at the end of the calendar year.
The only thing that changes is how much of it there is: files nobody prints any more, which somebody still has to be able to produce across the whole period.
UGB § 212 · BAO § 132
Which records must you keep, and for how long?
The federal tax code permits electronic retention on one condition: complete, ordered, content-identical and true-to-original reproduction must be guaranteed at all times until the period expires.
With an e-invoice the original is the structured record itself, not the pretty view of it. Convert the XML on import into a format of your own and then discard the file, and what you have kept is a transcript.
It makes sure the invoice arrives. After that it stops.
It does not say where the file should live, who finds it in four years, how it is searched, what happens when you change software, or how you get the whole set back out when you need it somewhere else. That was your problem before the obligation and it is your problem after it.
That gap is exactly why this archive exists.
Vaultivo is not an invoicing network. It sends no invoices, it is connected to no transmission service, and it does not make you capable of issuing e-invoices. If an obligation to issue applies to you, you need something else for that.
What Vaultivo is, is what comes afterwards. It takes the invoice as it is, files it unchanged, and keeps it in that form.
Where a structured e-invoice arrives and can be read completely, the fields are taken straight from it, without guessing. Where it cannot be read completely, it takes the same route as any other document. And like any other document it then waits in the Inbox until you confirm it.
Whether, and from when, you have to issue e-invoices yourself depends on your turnover, on your seat and on your customers'. This page states the rule and the timetable; it cannot classify your case and it is not tax advice.
Dates of this kind also move. The ones here were checked against the provisions in force on 6 September 2026; the date under the heading tells you how old that check is.