timo From what I understand, this field is not required for normal "B2B" invoices, but required for "B2G" (business to government) invoices in Germany.
Exactly.
Or is it common (for you) to write invoices to the same governmental institution multiple times a year or month?
Very common, at least one invoice per month and institution (we have several governmental institutions as customers). The Leitweg-ID should definitely be persistently connected to each specific institution the way the USt-ID is also persistently connected to a customer (by adding it beneath the customer’s address; the Leitweg-ID is also part of the address in our current PDF layout, so this would be fitting).
In regards to the "US purchase order" this would be a "PDF-only" feature
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As for the "order id" there is an e-invoice XML field for it (BT-13)
There seems to be some confusion here between PO and our Customer (not Order!) ID. I think this XML field is the field for the purchase order. A “PO” in U.S. jargon is exactly that: a unique ID for a specific order. So if there is even a specific XML field for that it should definitely not be „PDF-only“. (In contrast, a Customer ID is specific to a customer, not an order, and is defined and used only internally by us, so if it appeared as a generic note in the XML, this would be completely sufficient for us.)
but from what I know it's not required to use it in order to create a valid e-invoice.
It’s not required by law, but unfortunately, it’s required by our U.S. customers (i.e. their German branches).
They absolutely depend on this number for their automatic order processing, which is what the e-invoice is all about. This is probably the single most important data in an e-invoice for them. (Our U.S. customers are huge public companies.)
I would have to implement a more generic feature of adding additional lines (this has been requested before in the old feedback forums here).
Yes, I agree. Specific data in there such as the PO could be extracted just like the USt-ID etc.
This would be a much more complex feature, with the additional difficulty of adding a good and easy-to-understand UI, without overloading the screen.
I don’t understand why. A third generic text field with the possibility to add several lines which will be printed beneath the Invoice number etc. lines should suffice, no?
But this would also require to give each "invoice line" a value type, like "text" or "date"
Again, not sure why. AFAIK POs are a free form combination of text and numbers specific to each company. Since there is a specific XML field for that, the only important thing would be that this PO data would be extracted from the generic text field und put into the BT-13 XML field just like the customer’s USt-ID into the corresponding XML field.
