ELR Bridge for Avalara Send e-invoices from the PDFs you already produce.
ELR Bridge reads your invoices, checks them, builds the e-invoice each country asks for and sends it through Avalara E-Invoicing and Live Reporting. Your ERP stays as it is.
Illustration: ELR Bridge reads an example French invoice, FA-2026-001052. It finds the invoice number, date, buyer VAT number and amounts, ticks off each step on the way to Avalara, holds the invoice for checking, sends it and reports it delivered.
Why a bridge
The mandates are here. The ERP project can wait.
France, Belgium, Germany, Poland and the UAE now require structured e-invoices, or are phasing them in.
Connecting every ERP to Avalara is the long way round: an integration project per system, often per entity, before a single e-invoice leaves. Many companies don’t have that time, or that IT capacity, before their mandate starts.
ELR Bridge takes the short way. It starts from the invoice files you already produce, turns them into compliant e-invoices and sends them through Avalara, while giving finance, tax and AP a portal to see and control every document.
- Works next to any ERP or billing system, including several at once
- One dedicated bridge per customer, built and run by VATWorkx
- Invoices, credit notes and debit notes told apart and sent with the right UBL type
- Sending, e-reporting and receiving in one place
How it works
Two directions, every step visible per document in the portal.
Sending From your file to the tax authority
- Your filesPDF, Factur-X, ZUGFeRD or Excel
- ReadA template per invoice layout
- CheckHeld until you send it
- Rules + mappingWhich mandate, which UBL
- Avalara ELRSends it, follows the status
- Tax authorityOr network: PPF, Peppol, KSeF
Status, tax authority reference and legal archive come back to each document.
Receiving From your supplier to your AP process
- SupplierSends an e-invoice
- Avalara ELRReceives it
- ELR BridgeFetches and archives it
- Your AP mailboxUBL + PDF, one mail each
France: your approval (205) or refusal (210) goes back to the supplier.
What sets ELR Bridge apart
Designed by VAT specialists and engineers who implement Avalara E-Invoicing for a living, around what goes wrong in real projects.
No ERP project to start
ELR Bridge reads the invoices you already produce: PDFs with a template per layout, PDFs with the XML inside (Factur-X, ZUGFeRD) and an Excel template for many invoices at once. Your ERP and billing process stay as they are.
Nothing leaves unchecked
Every upload is held for checking. Per invoice you see what was read, the mandate the rules chose and any issue, with where it comes from: the file, the template, the mapping or the mandate. You decide what goes.
New invoice layouts without a developer
Upload a sample of a new invoice layout and the AI Agent drafts the template, checks its own work and tries it. You review and publish it. It only runs when you ask, and only for clients who agreed to it.
Changes you can prove
Templates, mappings and mandate rules change as drafts. A regression check runs every draft against your samples and recent documents and shows what would change before you publish. Every version can be rolled back.
Audit-ready from the first invoice
Every final document is kept write-once in a legal archive, seven years by default, each file with its SHA-256 fingerprint. An auditor’s request for a year of invoices is one ZIP, with a manifest and the full timeline.
Receiving without changing AP
Received e-invoices go to each entity’s purchase-invoice mailbox, one mail per invoice, with the UBL, a readable PDF and the supplier’s attachments. Your accounts payable process picks them up as it does today.
Control and traceability
Every document tells its whole story.
Who uploaded it, what was read and where on the page it was found, which rule and mapping decided, what Avalara and the tax authority answered, and when it was archived.
- UploadedEXMP-FR-FA-2026-001052.pdf, 3 KB, by jane.doe@example.com
- Read; nothing sentTemplate “Example France SAS – Facture”, version 2. All checks passed.
- Sent to AvalaraMandate FR-B2B-EINVOICE, rule “All documents”, version 2
- DeliveredComplete at Avalara, with the tax authority’s response
- ArchivedWrite-once until 5 Nov 2033 · SHA-256 7c1e…a94f
- Each field traced to where it was found on the PDF
- When Avalara or the authority doesn’t answer, the bridge tries again by itself
- Every Avalara API call logged for 30 days, with authorisation headers removed
- “Needs attention” on the overview: if it is empty, everything sent yesterday reached Avalara
Coverage
Built-in mappings for five countries.
Mandate rules decide per invoice which mandate and Avalara workflow apply, or why it isn’t sent. The mapping then turns the invoice data into the UBL that mandate expects.
| Country | Mandate, as Avalara names it | What the bridge sends | Built-in mapping |
|---|---|---|---|
| France | FR-B2B-EINVOICE | UBL e-invoice to EN 16931, with a readable PDF copy | FR UBL EN 16931 |
| France | FR-B2B-REPORTING, FR-B2C-REPORTING | E-reports for B2C and international B2B: flows 10.1 to 10.4 | Built by the bridge |
| Belgium | BE-B2B-PEPPOL | Peppol BIS e-invoice | BE Peppol BIS |
| Germany | DE-B2B-PEPPOL | Peppol BIS 3.0 e-invoice | DE Peppol BIS 3.0 |
| Poland | PL-B2B-EINVOICE | KSeF e-invoice | PL KSeF |
| United Arab Emirates | AE-B2B-DCTC | PINT AE e-invoice | AE PINT |
Your own mappings can extend a built-in one, and keep receiving its improvements, or start from a copy.
Mappings made in Avalara Studio can be imported, with their JSONata and fixed values.
Another country or mandate on your roadmap? Tell us which one.
France, end to end.
The French reform asks for more than e-invoices. ELR Bridge covers the e-reports and the buyer’s answers too, through the same Avalara connection.
E-reporting
Transactions that are not domestic B2B e-invoices are reported to the French authority. Upload the file, check the report’s lines per period, submit.
| Report | What you upload | Reported |
|---|---|---|
| B2C sales | A sales journal export from your ERP | Per 10 days or per month, depending on your VAT regime |
| B2C payments | The payments template | Per month |
| International sales | The invoices template, or the invoices you upload | Per period, as flow 10.1 |
| International purchases | The invoices template | Per period, as flow 10.1 |
| International payments | The payments template | Per month, as flow 10.2 |
Answering received invoices
Under the reform the buyer tells the supplier whether an invoice is approved (205) or refused (210). ELR Bridge sends your answer through Avalara.
- One by oneApprove, or refuse with a reason from the reform’s list. The French wording is filled in for you.
- In bulkFilter on “To answer”, tick the invoices, approve or refuse them together.
- From a spreadsheetDownload the invoices you can answer, fill in a decision per row, upload it. Every row is checked and shown before anything is sent.
One portal, three kinds of users.
Roles decide what each person sees and can do. The portal shows nothing a role doesn’t allow.
Finance and AR teams
Upload the invoices, follow each one to the tax authority, and fix what is held. A “Needs attention” box lists only what is waiting for them.
AP teams
Receive e-invoices in the mailbox they already use. In France, approve or refuse them one by one, in bulk, or from a spreadsheet.
Key users and administrators
Set up legal entities, templates, mappings and mandate rules, with drafts, regression checks and rollback, and without a developer.
Security and operations
Run like the compliance system it is.
Built by a team whose lead engineer spent more than 20 years in IT security and identity management, for tax data that has to be right and has to stay private.
- Access
- Roles for key users, support and administrators. Automatic sign-out after 10 minutes without activity.
- Secrets
- Kept in Azure Key Vault. The portal shows where a secret comes from and when it expires, never the secret itself.
- Connections
- Health of Avalara, Key Vault, file storage and the mail relay at a glance, each with a test button and an alert when one fails.
- Settings
- Client-wide or per legal entity. Every change asks for a reason and is kept in the history, and applies on the next run with no restart.
- AI
- Off unless switched on, and it only runs when a user asks. Invoices go to the AI service only for clients who agreed to it.
- Background jobs
- Sending, status checks and receiving run on a schedule you can see, run now, or pause until a date.
Built on Avalara
Avalara reaches the tax authorities. We make sure your invoices arrive ready.
Avalara E-Invoicing and Live Reporting delivers e-invoices and reports to tax authorities and networks worldwide. ELR Bridge is the layer in front of it: reading, checking, mapping and following up, so your teams work with invoices instead of APIs.
Behind ELR Bridge: the services that built it.
From strategic planning to hands-on compliance and tax tech, we cover all aspects of indirect tax management.
- 01 E-invoicing & real-time reporting We implement scalable e-invoicing frameworks and integrate real-time reporting solutions that comply with every local mandate.
- 02 ERPs & tax engines Indirect tax for ERP implementations and migrations, and for the tax engines behind them.
- 03 Data & process automation Automated workflows that make VAT more accurate and compliant. Less manual work, more time for you.
- 04 Data management VAT data collected, cleaned and organised for reporting you can trust. Review and predict with ease.
- 05 Advisory & digital transformation Strategic VAT guidance that optimises compliance, reduces risk and turns a mandate into a plan.
- 06 Ad interim compliance & accounting Modern VAT compliance built on automation, system logic and intelligent control layers.
- 07 Technology Custom software, AI solutions and e-invoicing middleware for Avalara, built by engineers who sit next to tax specialists.
- 08 DRECONIS reconciliation Our own tool: reconcile the general ledger against the VAT report and return, automatically.