The joke about Germans desperately asking for an invoice after an online purchase is a running gag among Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs. You know, not just any invoice, but the real, German one with .pdf extension and full address!

This joke has become reality, with hundreds of millions if not billions paid in fees on services promising to fix this for vendors, on bookkeeping software handling it for customers, and of course in lost revenue because many vendors simply don’t have the patience to do business with Germans anymore.

And it’s never enough: When the German finally gets his holy PDF, he demands more. He wants a “Leistungsdatum” (service date), insists on having his “Bestellnummer” (order number), and if he catches a business just swapping data without creating a new invoice number, he breaks into a cold sweat – because he knows that’s not how it should work.

Businesses offering invoice creation or merchant of record services have found a clever trick: They hide from Germans what they’re really doing behind the scenes. It’s obvious that some services simply generate invoice PDFs on the fly in a web portal, allowing you to change your address as often as you like to create 100 different invoices with the same number and amount and so on.

Even payment processors that transfer billions each day can’t get it 100% right to generate a true German invoice™.

The whole world doesn’t understand what this obsession is about. And so they fail to really get it right. But we Germans are, of course, right – and everyone else is wrong!

But why? What’s the purpose of a PDF when I already have bank statements, credit card records, and countless order emails that list the vendor and match the exact amount paid?

This fixation on having an invoice look like its 1975 is a huge waste of resources, and it distracts from actual fraud.
For instance, selecting a different country with 0% VAT is still possible in many online stores for digital goods. Companies valued millions don’t care about our VAT & when they are valued billions they just write “VAT” on invoices and add 19%, without transferring that money via MOSS back to Germany. They’re not collecting VAT – they’re imposing a tax on Germans to avoid additional customer support work. It’s fraud but we don’t care.

What’s the point of harassing small business owners for a stupid PDF file that does change nothing until they block entire countries as customers, while big companies get away with years of improper VAT collection? How long will we continue to think the world wraps around our rules?

Yet strangely, we Germans don’t care about what’s really happening behind the curtains. We’re simply satisfied when “ze Rechnungggg.pdf” finally arrives, having fulfilled our duty of annoying some small business owner in Wisconsin selling desktop background art for 3 bucks.