BR-DE-5Das Element "Seller contact point" (BT-41) muss übermittelt werden.

Official rule text

The seller contact point (BT-41) has to be filled — a named person or a department at the seller that the buyer can write to. EN 16931 carries BT-41 as an optional field and never tests it; the German CIUS is what makes it mandatory.

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-5 happen?

The field simply does not exist in many invoicing systems; only company name and address are captured. On export BT-41 stays empty even though BG-6 is present. An empty element is no help: the expression tests with normalize-space. In CII either of two elements satisfies it — a document carrying only ram:DepartmentName passes BR-DE-5, and converted to UBL that same text has to go into the single cbc:Name.

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:Name[boolean(normalize-space(.))]
CII
(ram:PersonName,ram:DepartmentName)[boolean(normalize-space(.))]

Source: rule set v2026-08-31

How do you fix BR-DE-5?

Send a person or department, such as "Accounting" or "Jane Doe": cac:AccountingSupplierParty/cac:Party/cac:Contact/cbc:Name in UBL, ram:SellerTradeParty/ram:DefinedTradeContact/ram:PersonName or ram:DepartmentName in CII. The telephone and email of the same group are BR-DE-6 and BR-DE-7, which report separately.

In the XML

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

Fails
<cac:AccountingSupplierParty>
  <cac:Party>
    <cac:Contact>
      <cbc:Telephone>+49 30 1234567</cbc:Telephone>
      <cbc:ElectronicMail>rechnung@muster.de</cbc:ElectronicMail>
    </cac:Contact>
  </cac:Party>
</cac:AccountingSupplierParty>
Fixed
<cac:AccountingSupplierParty>
  <cac:Party>
    <cac:Contact>
      <cbc:Name>Buchhaltung</cbc:Name>
      <cbc:Telephone>+49 30 1234567</cbc:Telephone>
      <cbc:ElectronicMail>rechnung@muster.de</cbc:ElectronicMail>
    </cac:Contact>
  </cac:Party>
</cac:AccountingSupplierParty>

Related rules

NormAPI provides technical validation, not tax or legal advice.