CIICross Industry Invoice

Where CII comes from

CII, short for Cross Industry Invoice, is published by UN/CEFACT, a United Nations body that writes standards for trade. A CII file starts with a root element named CrossIndustryInvoice, and every piece of the invoice, from the seller to each VAT rate, sits in a named field that software reads without retyping.

CII, UBL and Factur-X

The three formats of the French reform describe the same invoice, following the same European model, EN 16931. UBL and CII are two ways of writing that data as XML. A Factur-X is a PDF with a CII file inside it, named factur-x.xml, so every Factur-X carries CII.

That’s why our reader shows “CII” when you drop the XML on its own, after extracting it from a Factur-X. It names the syntax of the file, and the data it reads is the same as in the PDF.

Opening a CII file

Opened in a browser or a text editor, a CII invoice is a long string of tags. Yet it is the invoice itself, so don’t delete it: in France, an e-invoice is kept for 10 years in its original format. To read it, drop it into our free reader, which shows the seller, the buyer, the totals, the due date and the invoice lines, or turn it into a readable PDF to print or forward. Both work in your browser, without sending the file anywhere. The reader also opens CII credit notes, which share the structure of an invoice.