AMEFA simplifies e-invoicing across multiple formats with Interform
How AMEFA moved ahead of the German mandate and built an output setup that adapts as each customer's format requirement lands.
- Industry
- Wholesale distribution
- Business area
- Cutlery, tableware and kitchen accessories
- Country
- Germany
- ERP
- IFS Cloud
Customer overview
AMEFA is a wholesaler of cutlery, tableware and household kitchen accessories. The company designs and sells its own-label ranges alongside a carefully chosen selection of leading third-party brands, supplying retail and hospitality customers across Europe. With more than 90 years of trading history and roots in the Solingen cutlery cluster, AMEFA has built a reputation as a dependable supplier for kitchens, tables and hospitality operators of every scale.
AMEFA runs IFS Cloud as its core ERP. Its document output runs on InterformNG2, which handles invoices, order confirmations, delivery notes and warehouse labels day in, day out.
The challenge
Before Interform, invoices were generated directly from the ERP and sent as PDF attachments by email. The setup worked, but the AMEFA team ran into two recurring frustrations. The ERP’s document designer was difficult to work with, requiring painstaking cell-by-cell alignment for even minor changes. The logic for choosing the right layout and the right recipient was limited, making it hard to route documents such as an order confirmation to one address and the invoice to another. A single logo covered every output, with no straightforward way to change it per customer or per document.
Interform was brought in to solve those problems, and by the time e-invoicing rose to the top of the agenda it was already handling AMEFA’s core document output. The IT team had been tracking the timeline for the German e-invoicing mandate closely and moved on it early – well before any customer had asked. When the first request eventually arrived, roughly three years ago, the team already knew that ZUGFeRD, XRechnung and further European formats would all be part of the picture. The question was not whether to move, but how to cover the range of formats coming down the line – and how quickly a new one could be enabled the next time a customer asked for it.
The project
With Interform already in place and its integration with IFS running well, using the same platform for e-invoicing was, in the team’s own words, an obvious choice. That Interform could take on the new formats without adding another tool – and without another round of vendor selection – was itself a real benefit.
ZUGFeRD came first. The setup was completed jointly with the Interform team and confirmed against the first customer with only minor mapping adjustments. XRechnung followed, driven by public-sector customers where the format is mandatory. Christoph Lueg, IT Manager, oversees the Interform environment, and Matthias Weber, IT Support, has led the more recent hands-on work – including a further format implementation currently in testing for a customer that requires the universal UBL variant.
Interform’s use has grown well beyond invoicing. Delivery notes are produced with marketplace-specific branding – different logos, different tax treatments – reflecting AMEFA’s growing volume of business through major marketplaces. In the warehouse, InterformNG2 drives label printing for pallet identification and logistics operations. What began as a way to solve document-output problems in the ERP has grown, year on year, into the backbone of AMEFA’s document workflows.
The results
Enabling a new e-invoicing customer is now a matter of adding a customer number to a list. The right format is issued automatically the next time a document is produced. Around 25 customers currently receive ZUGFeRD invoices, and the plan is to make ZUGFeRD the default for every regular customer by the end of 2026 – every recipient gets a PDF they can read alongside the XML file that machine-processes it.
For the AMEFA finance team, day-to-day work has not changed. Invoices still look right, still reach the right people, and the format switch happens in the output layer without touching how the business runs. Compliance obligations have been met on time for every customer that has requested an e-invoice, and public-sector customers are handled through XRechnung without a separate project.
The stand-out result, though, is how little friction Interform generates. Christoph describes it as the piece of software AMEFA does not have to worry about – it just works, whatever the team throws at it. Template changes that once took hours in the ERP designer are now straightforward. Reliability is very high. And every new requirement, from a new marketplace to a new invoice format, has landed inside the same platform without breaking anything else.
"Interform is the piece of software that always works. Whatever use case we throw at it, it just works really well. To us, it was a no-brainer to also use Interform as our e-invoicing platform."
Christoph Lueg, IT Manager, AMEFA
Looking ahead
AMEFA plans to switch every customer to ZUGFeRD as standard by the end of 2026, moving from opt-in to universal issue. As further EU mandates land – in e-invoicing and beyond – the team expects to absorb them inside the same setup, without another tool selection.
Rolling the same capability out more widely across the group would also be straightforward. The technical foundation is in place, the templates exist, and the same ERP integration is available – so a new format requirement in another part of the group would start from a working solution rather than an empty page.
Talk to Interform about your ERP output
A 30-minute call. We look at the documents your ERP produces today, which of them still need someone to touch them, and what InterformNG2 would automate first. You leave knowing what would change and what would stay as it is.
