Electronic invoicing means issuing, sending and receiving an invoice in a structured format that the recipient's software reads without any re-keying. The French reform that makes it compulsory between companies took effect on 1 September 2026. Every company established in France and registered for VAT must now be able to receive an electronic invoice, while large companies and mid-sized companies must already issue theirs in that form for their domestic business-to-business transactions.
The duty to receive applies with no size threshold. A micro-business that will not have to issue its own structured invoices until September 2027 must already be able to receive those from suppliers that are already in scope for issuing. Email with a PDF invoice attached stops being the reference channel for those exchanges. MoneyVox notes that no penalty will be applied to any company during 2026, and describes 1 September as the starting point of the reform.
Who owes what, and from when
| Company category | Receiving | Issuing and e-reporting |
|---|---|---|
| Large companies and mid-sized companies (ETI) | 1 September 2026 | 1 September 2026 |
| SMEs, small firms and micro-businesses | 1 September 2026 | 1 September 2027 |
An accredited platform is an operator registered by the tax authority and cleared to carry electronic invoices and to pass data to the Direction générale des Finances publiques. The supplier files its invoice with the platform it has chosen. That platform checks the format, hands the invoice to the buyer's platform, then tracks the document's statuses through to its final outcome.
Routing relies on a directory kept by the tax authority, which maps each company to the platform it has appointed. The supplier's platform looks up the destination address from the buyer's identifier, which is why the buyer's SIREN number, the French company registration number, has become a mandatory field on the invoice.
Three formats, one shared semantic model
The technical framework specifies three structured formats: Factur-X, UBL and CII. Journal du Net presents them as the three formats the DGFiP accepts, on a page bylined to the software publisher Sage that goes on to describe Sage's own accredited platform. That byline makes it a weak authority on the formats. Each carries the same semantic model, that of the European standard EN 16931, which sets out the information an invoice must hold. Factur-X pairs an XML file with a PDF rendering a person can read. UBL and CII are pure XML grammars.
E-reporting covers the settlement as well as the invoice
E-reporting is the transfer to the tax authority of data on the transactions that electronic invoicing does not cover, mainly sales to consumers and cross-border transactions. The items sent include the amount of the transaction and the VAT charged on it.
On a supply of services, French VAT becomes chargeable when payment is collected, not when the invoice is issued. The invoice alone therefore cannot date the supplier's tax liability. The Service-Public notice lists the failure to send the required payment data among the breaches that carry a penalty, which places the settlement among the items the tax authority expects. The sources cited here describe neither the exact content of that data nor the point at which it is sent. The payment becomes declared data instead of an internal entry reconciled after the fact.
New invoice fields and the reliable audit trail
Four fields have been added to the invoices of companies in scope for issuing: the buyer's SIREN number, the delivery address where it differs from the billing address, the nature of the transaction depending on whether it covers goods, services or both, and a statement of the option to account for VAT on an invoice basis.
The reliable audit trail is the standing documentation that links an invoice to the order, the delivery and the settlement, and that guarantees the authenticity of the origin, the integrity of the content and the legibility of the document under article 289 of the French tax code. The structured format and the chain of statuses cover part of that. Tying the invoice back to the real economic transaction remains the company's own duty.
The penalty regime rests on fixed fines, charged per breach. Three breaches are targeted: failure to issue in electronic format, failure to use an accredited platform, and failure to send the data. The Service-Public notice states €50 per invoice not issued in electronic form, capped at €15,000 a year. For the lack of a platform, it sets €500 where the company has not put matters right within three months of a formal notice. The fine rises to €1,000 on the next breach, then to a further €1,000 for each three-month period the failure continues. The tax administration has said, however, that it will take a lenient view of businesses acting in good faith that run into difficulty on 1 September, and will not apply penalties straight away. The timetable does not move: the obligation stands, and it is the penalty that is held back.