Guide

Monthly Invoice Export: Send Shopify Invoices to Your Accountant

Updated 2026-07-02

Sooner or later, every merchant gets the same monthly message from their accountant: please send over last month’s invoices. Collecting them order by order in Shopify quickly eats an evening. Faktwise bundles the whole month into a single download instead: a ZIP with every invoice PDF, every XML file and a CSV summary built to open cleanly in German Excel. This guide walks through how the export works, what the CSV contains and, just as important, what the export deliberately is not.

How to download the monthly export

The export is deliberately simple:

1. Open the Export page in Faktwise.
2. Pick the month you need.
3. Download the ZIP and pass it on to your accountant, for example by email or through a shared cloud folder.

That is the whole workflow. The ZIP contains everything your accountant needs for the month: the documents themselves and a summary of the numbers.

What is inside the ZIP

Three things:

• Every PDF for the month. Each invoice as a human-readable PDF, including credit notes. A credit note (Gutschrift in German) is the correction document Faktwise creates automatically when you refund an order in Shopify; it shows positive amounts and references the original invoice number.
• Every XML file. Each invoice comes with a machine-readable XML version based on the European standard EN 16931. For regular invoices this is the same data that is embedded in the ZUGFeRD PDF (ZUGFeRD is a normal PDF that additionally carries the invoice data in machine-readable form). For public-sector orders with a Leitweg-ID, the routing ID German authorities use to receive electronic invoices, it is an XRechnung, the pure XML format for invoices to German public bodies. Many accountants never open the XMLs, but they are included in case yours does.
• A CSV summary. Every document of the month as a table, one row per document.

The CSV summary in detail

The CSV is semicolon separated. That sounds like a footnote, but it is the reason the file opens straight into clean columns in German Excel, with no import wizard and no garbled characters.

For each document the summary includes, among other columns:

• Number: the sequential invoice number, for example INV-2026-00042. Faktwise assigns numbers gap-free per year.
• Type: invoice or credit note.
• Date and the related Shopify order.
• Country of the buyer.
• Tax scheme: which VAT scenario was applied, for example German domestic VAT or an intra-EU B2B supply of goods.
• Net, VAT and gross amounts.

With that, your accountant can check the monthly totals, filter by country or tax scheme, and open exactly the PDFs that raise questions.

An honest boundary: this is not a DATEV posting file

The CSV is a summary for humans, not a bookkeeping import. It cannot be imported into DATEV as a posting batch (DATEV is the accounting platform most German tax firms run their bookkeeping on). Faktwise focuses on creating correct invoices and keeping them safely archived.

If your accountant wants a full Shopify-to-DATEV export, that is exactly what our separate app EasyBelege does. The two apps complement each other: Faktwise creates and archives the invoices, EasyBelege delivers the data for DATEV bookkeeping.

GoBD: the export deletes nothing

GoBD is the German set of rules for how tax-relevant records must be stored digitally. In plain terms: invoices have to be kept for the statutory retention period and must not be changed after the fact.

The monthly export is therefore just a copy for handover. Everything stays in the Faktwise archive: invoices are stored as PDF plus XML for ten years, beyond the statutory eight-year retention period and are set up so they are not altered after issue; corrections happen exclusively through credit notes. An audit trail records what happened and when, and personal data is stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM). All of this is designed to help you meet the GoBD requirements. For the bigger picture, see our guide on GoBD invoice archiving with Shopify.

One practical note: if you ever uninstall Faktwise, export your archive first, so you keep every document in your own hands for the rest of the retention period.

Three tips for the handover

1. Set a fixed rhythm. Export the previous month once it is closed and deliver the ZIP the same way every time. Accountants appreciate predictability, and follow-up questions get rarer.
2. Explain refunds once. Credit notes are created automatically when you refund an order in Shopify. There is one exception worth mentioning to your accountant: a refund that only covers shipping or only a manually entered amount currently creates no credit note. Agree with your accountant how to handle those cases.
3. OSS is reported separately. If you take part in the OSS scheme, the EU procedure for reporting B2C sales to consumers in other EU countries, Faktwise builds a quarterly report on its OSS page, including a CSV in the official import format that you can import into your OSS-EU return in the BZSt-Online-Portal. Always check the figures in the portal before you submit. Our guide on EU OSS VAT with Shopify has the details.

The monthly export takes the collecting off your plate; judging and booking the numbers stays with your accountant, because Faktwise is software, not tax advice. If you want to see the export for yourself, take a look at the demo or install Faktwise from the Shopify App Store. Your accountant will notice the difference in the very first month.