How Kleinunternehmer invoices work

Since 1 January 2025 § 19 UStG works on two net turnover limits: no more than €25,000 in the previous calendar year, and no more than €100,000 in the current one. Both are net figures measured by money actually received, not by invoice date.

The €100,000 limit is a hard ceiling, not a forecast. The moment a sale takes you over it, that sale is already taxable and you are on the normal VAT regime for the rest of the year. In your first year of trading only the €25,000 limit applies.

The 2025 reform also changed the legal mechanism. Your sales used to be taxable with the tax simply not collected; now they are genuinely exempt ("steuerfrei") under § 19 (1) UStG. That is why the wording on the invoice changed too.

A normal invoice follows § 14 (4) UStG. A Kleinunternehmer invoice follows § 34a UStDV, which has existed since 1 January 2025 and asks for slightly less: no tax rate, no tax amount, and the total as a single figure.

Skrolla asks for everything on the longer § 14 (4) list regardless, because it costs you one extra field and removes a whole category of argument.

§ 34a sentence 1 no. 5 UStDV requires the total to be shown as one figure together with a notice that the small-business exemption under § 19 UStG applies. There is no prescribed wording. Skrolla prints:

Leave it off and your invoice is formally incomplete — and your customer may reasonably wonder whether you simply forgot the VAT, which is the sort of question that ends in a Nachzahlung.

One thing you must not do: show a VAT amount anyway. Charge tax you are not entitled to charge under § 14c UStG and you owe it to the Finanzamt regardless.

For B2B services the place of supply is where your customer is (§ 3a (2) UStG, Art. 44 of the VAT Directive), so you invoice without VAT and your customer accounts for it locally under Art. 196.

The notice is not optional and its wording is effectively fixed: "Steuerschuldnerschaft des Leistungsempfängers". On an English invoice the Finanzamt accepts "Reverse charge" — that translation is in Annex 8 to the UStAE, added by the BMF letter of 17 September 2025, which replaced the 2013 list. Skrolla prints both, because printing both costs nothing.

The notice alone is not enough: § 14a (3) UStG wants your USt-IdNr. and your customer's on the invoice. A missing customer number is the single most common reason a reverse-charge invoice comes back.

As a Kleinunternehmer this gets genuinely awkward. § 19 (1) sentence 2 UStG switches off parts of § 14a for you, and cross-border supplies can drag you into VAT registration and the Zusammenfassende Meldung. Skrolla supports the mode and warns you. This is the point at which you ask a Steuerberater.

Since 1 January 2025 every business established in Germany must be able to receive, read and archive a structured e-invoice under EN 16931. Kleinunternehmer are not exempt from this, and your customer does not need your consent to send one. A working email address technically satisfies the receiving duty — but you still have to be able to read the thing.

In practice you will meet two formats. XRechnung is bare XML in either UBL 2.1 or UN/CEFACT CII syntax, with no human-readable layer at all. ZUGFeRD and Factur-X are hybrids: a normal-looking PDF with the same XML embedded as an attachment, which is why they open fine and still count as structured.

Issuing is being phased in separately: businesses with more than €800,000 of prior-year turnover must issue e-invoices from 1 January 2027, and everyone else from 1 January 2028. Kleinunternehmer stay exempt from issuing under § 34a sentence 4 UStDV.

Archiving matters as much as reading. The structured XML is the original invoice, so keep the file itself for the retention period — a printout is not a substitute. Skrolla keeps the raw XML in your local archive next to the readable version for exactly this reason.

The number has to be unique and issued once. It does not have to be a single unbroken run of integers: prefixes and per-year or per-customer series are fine as long as any given number is used exactly once and the scheme is coherent.

Skrolla stores the last number you used per seller profile and increments the trailing digits, so 2026-014 becomes 2026-015. Since the counter is in your browser, check it after you clear browser data or switch devices.