How GRAJ creates, numbers and keeps the invoices of a seller — and why an issued invoice is never altered.
How GRAJ creates, numbers, stores and hands over the invoices, credit notes, orders and order lines of a seller who sells through GRAJ. It is GRAJ's part of the seller's procedural documentation (Verfahrensdokumentation under the GoBD). The seller's own documentation of the rest of their bookkeeping stays theirs to write.
An invoice is issued the first time a party to an order produces it: the downloaded or printed invoice, the emailed invoice, or the EDI invoice. At that moment the database gives it the next number in the seller's own series, inside one transaction that also stores the invoice, so a number is never skipped or used twice. Draft and canceled orders are never invoiced.
The whole invoice as issued — seller, buyer, lines, rates, tax and totals — is stored with it as a frozen copy. Every later copy (the PDF, the emailed copy) is printed from that frozen copy, not rebuilt from the order.
Orders placed before the numbered series began keep the number they always printed, which is derived from the order itself (INV-YYMM- followed by six characters of the order's id). Those are marked "vor Nummernkreis" in the export.
An issued invoice cannot be edited or deleted. A rule in the database itself refuses every change and every deletion, whoever asks — GRAJ's own staff and server included.
A correction is a new document: a credit note, numbered in its own series, that names the invoice it corrects. It cannot credit more than that invoice's total, and once issued it cannot be edited or deleted either.
Participants never write to these records directly. Only GRAJ's server writes them, and only through the two database functions that issue an invoice and issue a credit note.
In GRAJ's database, hosted by Supabase on Amazon Web Services in the United States (region us-east-1). There is no copy in the EU. Keeping electronic books and records outside the EU generally needs the approval of your tax office (§ 146(2b) AO) — confirm with your tax adviser whether that applies to you.
GRAJ does not delete invoices or credit notes. Closing your GRAJ account does not remove them: your personal details are anonymized and the orders, settlements, invoices and credit notes stay, because they are the other party's records too and the tax trail.
On Exports, under "Tax audit export (Germany)", you choose a year, a quarter or a month and download one ZIP file. It holds rechnungen.csv, gutschriften.csv, auftraege.csv and auftragspositionen.csv, an index.xml describing each of them in the Beschreibungsstandard (DTD gdpdu-01-09-2004), and this text. That is the data carrier for the third kind of data access (Z3, § 147(6) AO).
The files hold only your own records: invoices and credit notes you issued, and orders you sold. Amounts are in each currency's own decimals with a decimal comma, dates are DD.MM.YYYY, fields are separated by semicolons and text is in double quotes. Nothing in a record is changed on the way out.
GRAJ does not give a tax auditor a login to read your records in GRAJ (direct or indirect access, Z1 and Z2). You hand over the export.
GRAJ does not file anything with the Finanzamt, is not a certified bookkeeping system, has no auditor's attestation of this procedure, and keeps no journal of your bookings outside GRAJ. The export covers what you sold through GRAJ, not the rest of your business.