Author: admin

Today, march 24th, 2024, we released a set of changes to both our infrastructure and our Mustangserver server application.

Updates to the infrastructure

• There are now minimum Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in our contract.
  In the basic configuration we only guarantee 99% availability but we can talk if you need more. We now also have more scalable prices.
  The amount of operations per month when we still consider someone a “standard” customer has been increased five-fold.
• Authentication using API keys: API keys are easier to use than our standard oauth2 authentication and they can be restricted by time, referrer or IP address. This was possible before but we now resolved the last issues and added it to our documentation.
• There is now end-to-end-monitoring on both APIs, Mustangserver and Mustangserver-docs. Previously we monitored the OS and the process only, but not it’s responses, which in very rare cases would give us false negatives. Now we periodically perform a full round trip including actual operations on the api manager and the server process.
• Load balancing is now tested and enabled: We tested the already existing load balancer, now we really “armed” it.

Application updates

Among others,

• we updated the Phive validator to now also validate e.g. german XRechnung 3.0.1
  (for CII this was previously possible using Mustangservers internal /validate validation),
• we updated the documentation e.g. on the visualization, i.e. on xmltohtml
• we made it easier to log messages in a massively parallel scenario and
• we added a endpoint “combine”, which adds a invoice object as JSON directly to
  a PDF/A file. Previously there was only combineXML, which required the JSON to be converted
  to XML in a previous step.

The mediation council has suggested yesterday to introduce mandatory domestic B2B e-invoicing in Germany two years later than originally anticipated, with an obligation to read as of 2025 and write as of 2026. The german parliament may confirm this compromise on 2024-02-23 and the federal council should then ratify on 22.03.2024.

Update on 24.02.2024: I was corrected that the deadline remains 2025/2026, in the original version of this post on Thursday, 22 February I had incorrectly interpreted a requested two year delay to 2027/2028.

Mustangserver 1.2, available since January 8th, 2024, sported minor changes, the only differences being that /combineXML now supports XRechnung 3 as output and
/parse as well as /invoice2XML accordingly support email addresses of tradeparties, not only of their contacts: Already previously one could validate XRechnung 3.0.

This new version has now been set as default on Monday, 29 January 2024.

The new version of Mustangproject, 2.10.0, released today, December 30th 2023, adds write support for XRechnung 3.0.1, which becomes mandatory for german B2G invoices as of February 2024 (issue #343). Users will need to add email addresses for also for tradeparties themselves, not only for their contacts.
Additionally two minor issues were fixed, concerning PDF/A3 input from inputstream and the commandline is now again capable opf producing Factur-X 1 files, closing issue #354.

On Saturday, December 9th, 2023, during the planned maintenance window of Mustangserver we released version 1.1.
This release

• Renames a parameter for consistency (invoice2XML’s parameter standard was renamed to format)
• Improves exception handling and also returns exception messages where they may have been discarded in the past
• The internally used header parameter Username which was previously listed optional has now been removed altogether from the interactive demo version. The parameter had been overwritten internally by the API management anyway but it was confusing for users who may have thought they had to enter something, which caused errors, anyway.
• The endpoint CombineXML transparently now also accepts PDF/A-3 input files for Factur-X output. This is partly due to the fact that we’ve seen that PDF/A-3s created with the mustangserver-docs endpoint in some cases (heavy use of big graphics) could be up to 80% smaller in size compared to their PDF/A-1 counterparts, presumambly, due to compression algorithms introducted between those versions.

Additionally, during the maintenance we

• updated our SSL certificates, which would otherwise have been due on December, 23rd
• We now by default redirect to “devportal”, i.e. the API “market place”, when accessing api.usegroup.de. Previously the build-in auto-redirection was to “publisher” (part of the administration) which was unfortunate for users who had used self-sign-up and may have been confronted with spurious lack-of-privileges-messages.
• We restricted access to Mustangserver-docs, the PDF/A-generating endpoint. Existing users still have access but new users, in particular those using self-sign-up, will have to specifically request access in the future if they require to test it, as it is a premium feature anyway.

Mustangproject version 2.9.0 was released today, November 27th, 2023.
New features include

• Previously one had to specify if the input was PDF/A-1 or PDF/A-3, now with #341 we have input PDF-A Version autodetection
• It can now validate XRechnung 3.0.1 #347

and it comes with the following fixes

• Missing closing tag in BankDetails when there’s no BIC number #339
• PDF/A-3 input now also sets a default ZUGFeRD version

The following known issues remain:

• the Xrechnung validation still only covers the CII version #337,
• it does not yet write XR 3.0 #343 and
• there are still known ZUGFeRD upstream issues with validation in particular affecting XRechnung #316

On Monday, October 2nd, 15:00 CET, we’ll meet online and discuss what has been said on the ZUGFeRD Developer days 28./29.09. in Bielefeld and clarify open questions on

https://jochenstrk.my.webex.com/jochenstrk.my/j.php?MTID=m116aca8ef681a3507ddd4eb7581bd375
Montag, 2. Oktober 2023 15:00 | 1 Stunde | (UTC+02:00) Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rom, Stockholm, Wien
Meeting-Kennnummer: 2361 186 6413
Passwort: Gwe6fJBGm45 (49363524 über Telefon- und Videosysteme)

Über Videosystem beitreten
Wählen Sie 23611866413@webex.com
Sie können auch 62.109.219.4 wählen und Ihre Meeting-Nummer eingeben.

Über Telefon beitreten
+44-20-7660-8149 United Kingdom Toll

Zugriffscode: 236 118 66413;-)

See you there,
Jochen

As preparation for domestic B2B e-invoicing potentially becoming mandatory in Germany as of 2026 (background) we implemented UBL support for the InvoiceImporter.
And Heavenfighter was able to help and contributed the long awaited command line option to switch off file logging, “–disable-file-logging”.
Mustang version 2.8.0 was released today, on September 13th, 2023.

Today, June 29th, 2023, we released version 1.3.0 of our e-invoice viewer Quba.

Apart from the usual credit note type in invoice documents, still the only way how credit notes are done in the data formats “Cross Industry Invoice” (CII), this release now also supports the dedicated “Universal Business Language” (UBL) credit note root element (issue #24). Plus Quba now works better when attempting to open multiple files from outside the application (issue #25).

Quba is a open source stand alone application for Windows, Linux and Mac, which can be downloaded on it’s website. Apart from UBL and CII (XRechnung and the like) it supports side-by-side-visualization of Factur-X/ZUGFeRD documents. It may check for online updates but unless explicit consent has been granted (e.g. because documents are to be validated) it works offline, so your invoices won’t leave your computer. While Mustangproject so far focussed at least on semi-professional users, while Quba is ideal for end users.

The close relationship in the open source ecosystem not only shows in knowledge transfer (example) between “our” two applications but also in the fact that Quba extended an amendmend of a project called Open XRechnung Toolbox to the original Kosit XSLT visualization transformations. The response of the leading german associations to the request of the german government if mandatory Business-to-business (B2B) e-invoicing was possible by 2025 (developments and link to original request, as well as to their reply) could have mentioned the Open XRechnung Toolbox, but in particular might have rather ment Quba than Mustangproject in their footnotes. Otherwise the reponse was very interesting, scrutinizing the ambitious date and called for a free-to-use-solution, which, we would like to add, seems particularly important in the light that mandatory B2B e-invoices also implies a de-facto obligation to german digital invoice archival rules GoBD.