France’s business-to-business e-invoicing mandate took effect on September 1, 2026. Every company established in France and registered for VAT must now be able to receive an electronic invoice, and large companies and midsize companies (ETIs) must already issue theirs in that form for domestic B2B transactions. An electronic invoice here means one issued, sent, and received in a structured format that the buyer’s software reads without re-keying.
The duty to receive has no size threshold. A micro-business that will not issue its own structured invoices until September 2027 must already accept them from suppliers that are in scope today. A PDF attached to an email stops being the standard channel for these exchanges. MoneyVox reports that no penalty will be applied to any company in 2026, and describes September 1 as the starting point of the reform rather than a deadline.
Receiving starts now for everyone, issuing is phased by size
| Company category | Receiving | Issuing and e-reporting |
|---|---|---|
| Large companies and midsize companies (ETIs) | September 1, 2026 | September 1, 2026 |
| SMEs, very small businesses, and micro-businesses | September 1, 2026 | September 1, 2027 |
Invoices now move through approved platforms (plateformes agréées): operators registered by the tax authority and authorized to carry electronic invoices and pass data to the DGFiP, France’s tax administration. The supplier uploads its invoice to the platform it has chosen. That platform checks the format, delivers the invoice to the buyer’s platform, and tracks the document’s status through to its final outcome.
Routing relies on a directory run by the tax authority, which maps each company to the platform it has designated. The supplier’s platform looks up the delivery address from the buyer’s identifier. That is why the buyer’s SIREN number, the 9-digit French company ID, is now a mandatory field on the invoice.
Three formats share one European data model
The technical framework allows three structured formats: Factur-X, UBL, and CII. Journal du Net lists them as the three formats the DGFiP accepts, but the page is bylined by the software vendor Sage and goes on to promote Sage’s own approved platform, which makes it a weak authority on formats. All three follow the same semantic model, defined by the European standard EN 16931, which sets out the information an invoice must contain. Factur-X pairs an XML file with a human-readable PDF. UBL and CII are pure XML syntaxes.
E-reporting reaches the payment, not just the invoice
E-reporting is the transmission to the tax authority of data on transactions that e-invoicing does not cover, mainly sales to consumers and cross-border transactions. The data includes the transaction amount and the VAT charged.
For services, VAT becomes due when the price is collected, not when the invoice is issued, so the invoice alone cannot date the supplier’s tax liability. Service-Public’s guidance page F23208 lists failure to send the required payment data among the breaches subject to penalties, which puts payment among the data the tax authority expects to receive. The sources cited here do not specify exactly what that data contains or when it must be sent. Either way, a payment becomes reported data rather than an internal entry reconciled after the fact.
Four new invoice fields and a reliable audit trail
Companies subject to the issuing mandate must add four fields to their invoices: the buyer’s SIREN number; the delivery address, if it differs from the billing address; the nature of the transaction (goods, services, or both); and a statement that the supplier has opted to pay VAT on an accrual basis, where it has.
Companies must also maintain a reliable audit trail: standing documentation that links an invoice to the order, the delivery, and the payment, and that guarantees the authenticity of its origin, the integrity of its content, and its legibility under Article 289 of the French General Tax Code. The structured format and the chain of status updates cover part of that requirement. Linking the invoice to the underlying business transaction remains the company’s job.
Fixed fines apply, but not yet
Penalties are fixed fines charged per breach, and they target three failures: not issuing invoices electronically, not using an approved platform, and not transmitting the required data. According to Service-Public’s guidance, failing to issue an electronic invoice costs €50 per invoice, capped at €15,000 a year. A company that does not receive its invoices through an approved platform gets a formal notice and three months to comply. After that, it faces a €500 fine, then €1,000 if it is still out of compliance after a second three-month period, and a further €1,000 for every three months the failure continues.
The tax administration has nonetheless promised leniency toward companies acting in good faith that run into difficulty on September 1, and will not enforce penalties right away. The timetable itself has not moved: the obligation is in force, and only its enforcement is on hold.