Wood, stone and resin
Eposy Tex sells handmade jewellery from a Shopify store with a dark, workshop feel. The pieces combine wood, stone and resin, and the homepage copy is written in the first person by the maker. New visitors get a 10 percent welcome code. Everything is priced in euros and shown in German.
The tone carries over to paperwork. Someone who has just read a maker's own account of a piece expects the quote that follows to look made for them, and a generic printout would undercut that.
What German paperwork asks for
An invoice in Germany follows section 14 of the VAT act (UStG). It has to carry the name and address of seller and buyer, a tax number or USt-IdNr., the issue date, a consecutive invoice number, a description of what was sold, the delivery date, the net amount, the tax rate and the tax amount. A business buyer who receives an invoice with a field missing may not be able to deduct the input VAT.
Quotes get no such list. A quote (Angebot) is a price in writing that tax law leaves alone, and for handmade work it often comes before the sale.
The e-invoice rules are newer. Since January 2025 every German business must be able to receive structured e-invoices from other businesses, in formats such as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD. Sending them becomes mandatory in 2027 for companies above 800,000 euros of prior-year turnover and in 2028 for everyone else. A plain PDF won't do for business-to-business sales. Sales to private buyers sit outside the rule, and so do quotes.
The quote template at work
Eposy Tex installed PDF Invoice in 2024. The app has sent more than 220 documents since. The template on its account is the draft-order quote, set to German, so a quote built from a Shopify draft order comes out as a finished PDF headed Angebot, with supplier, billing and shipping addresses, each item with its SKU and variant, the subtotal, USt 19 percent, shipping and the total.
The account also holds an order template, an invoice template, a refund template and a packing slip, five document types in all. Invoice emails go out automatically.
The sample on this page is invented. The seller details, the customer, the tax IDs and the pieces on the quote are made up. Only the layout, the language and the template are the merchant's real setup.
What the numbers say
Not much, which suits a shop this size. More than 220 documents sent since 2024 is a small figure beside the big stores in this series. The merchant also left a five-star review on the Shopify App Store about its support, and the words are quoted below exactly as written.
Try the same setup
A maker who sends quotes needs a German template, a draft-order quote that looks finished and invoices that leave without a manual step. If that describes your shop, install PDF Invoice from the Shopify App Store and start with the quote template. To see which fields your current invoice lacks, run the free invoice audit.