← Supported standards

UN/CEFACT CII

UN/CEFACT · Cross Industry Invoice SIGNET support: Architectural alignment — via the EN 16931 semantic model

What it is

The Cross Industry Invoice (CII) is the UN/CEFACT XML invoice syntax. Alongside UBL, it is one of the two syntaxes recognised under the EU e-invoicing framework as a binding of the EN 16931 semantic model, and it is the XML component embedded inside the hybrid Factur-X / ZUGFeRD PDF invoice formats widely used in France and Germany.

The syntax is maintained by UN/CEFACT. Official reference →

How SIGNET supports it

CII sits in SIGNET's architectural alignment tier. The canonical Invoice is mapped field by field to the EN 16931 semantic model — the model of which CII is a syntax binding — so a SIGNET invoice is convertible to CII and to the Factur-X format that embeds it. The specification's mapping table records Factur-X convertibility explicitly.

The distinction from the top tier is a matter of shipped tooling, stated plainly: the reference repository's runnable, CI-verified transform targets the UBL binding as profiled by Peppol BIS Billing; an equivalent CII serialiser is not shipped today. Because the alignment is anchored at the semantic layer rather than any single syntax, producing one is a serialisation exercise over an already-verified mapping rather than new semantic work — and a natural candidate for a community contribution under the change-proposal process.

Where it lives in the standard