BR-DE-3Das Element "Seller city" (BT-37) muss übermittelt werden.

Official rule text

The seller's postal address (BG-5) must carry the city: BT-37, mandatory in XRechnung and not required by EN 16931 at all. It is the seller's address that is meant — the buyer's city is BR-DE-8, a differing delivery address BR-DE-10.

Severity
Error
Applies to
CII, UBL
Rule set
v2026-08-31
Checked on

Written and checked against the official KoSIT rule set by Dmytro Yalanskyi, NormAPI.

Why does BR-DE-3 happen?

The address often exists internally as one combined address line. Without clean separation into street, post code and city, the structured city field stays empty. An empty element is no way out: the expression tests with normalize-space, so a <cbc:CityName/> with no content, or with a single space in it, counts as not transmitted.

What the validator checks

The expression the official KoSIT rule set evaluates — not paraphrased, but read from the Schematron file it ships. UBL and CII address different document trees, so the same rule reads differently in each.

UBL
cbc:CityName[boolean(normalize-space(.))]
CII
ram:CityName[boolean(normalize-space(.))]

Source: rule set v2026-08-31

How do you fix BR-DE-3?

Send the city in BT-37: cac:AccountingSupplierParty/cac:Party/cac:PostalAddress/cbc:CityName in UBL, ram:SellerTradeParty/ram:PostalTradeAddress/ram:CityName in CII. Split addresses into individual fields once, in the master data. The post code beside it is BR-DE-4, and the two usually fail together.

In the XML

A UBL fragment. The CII path is named above — same change, different element names.

Fails
<cac:AccountingSupplierParty>
  <cac:Party>
    <cac:PostalAddress>
      <cbc:StreetName>Musterstraße 1</cbc:StreetName>
      <cbc:PostalZone>10115</cbc:PostalZone>
      <cac:Country><cbc:IdentificationCode>DE</cbc:IdentificationCode></cac:Country>
    </cac:PostalAddress>
  </cac:Party>
</cac:AccountingSupplierParty>
Fixed
<cac:AccountingSupplierParty>
  <cac:Party>
    <cac:PostalAddress>
      <cbc:StreetName>Musterstraße 1</cbc:StreetName>
      <cbc:CityName>Berlin</cbc:CityName>
      <cbc:PostalZone>10115</cbc:PostalZone>
      <cac:Country><cbc:IdentificationCode>DE</cbc:IdentificationCode></cac:Country>
    </cac:PostalAddress>
  </cac:Party>
</cac:AccountingSupplierParty>

Related rules

NormAPI provides technical validation, not tax or legal advice.