France e-invoicing 2027: the checklist for your sales

You can choose an approved platform in an afternoon. You can’t clean up a customer file in an afternoon.

The calendar fits in two lines. Receiving electronic invoices has been mandatory for every business established in France and subject to VAT since 1 September 2026, so that one is behind you. Issuing them becomes mandatory for SMEs, very small businesses, micro-entreprises and the self-employed on 1 September 2027. For the full timeline, the formats and the fines, read our reference piece on mandatory e-invoicing in France.

What stands between you and compliance is not a piece of software. No tool, however approved, will invent a SIREN nobody ever gave you, guess whether your online course is a good or a service, or connect an order to a payment that nothing connects. Compliance lives inside your sales data, and sales data takes months to get straight.

Four steps, in this order. The first one is by far the longest.

Three things are almost always missing from a customer file: the SIREN, the delivery address when it differs from the billing address, and the answer to a question nobody had needed to ask, namely whether the buyer is a business or a private individual.

The SIREN, nine digits that govern the rest

Your customer’s SIREN becomes a mandatory detail on invoices between businesses subject to VAT. Nine digits, not to be confused with the SIRET, which has fourteen and designates one site, or with the intra-community VAT number, which starts with FR. It is the number the administration uses to match your invoice against the purchase declared on the other side, and the one your platform uses to find your customer’s platform in the directory.

Don’t email your whole database

The temptation is to run one big collection campaign. That is the worst possible use of the time you have left. Do the opposite:

• Add the field to your order form now, so every new sale arrives complete.
• Add it to the customer account area, so returning buyers fill it in themselves.
• Handle by hand only your recurring business customers, the ones who make up most of your B2B revenue. There are few of them, you know them by first name, one message does it.
• Leave dormant accounts alone. A customer who has not ordered in a long time does not need a SIREN in your database; they will give it to you on their next order.

The SIREN is public data. It appears on your customer’s own invoices, on their extrait Kbis and in the state company directory. You need no permission to ask for it, only a field in the right place.

Business or private, the question that sorts everything

This is the most underrated field in your file. It decides whether a sale falls under e-invoicing or under e-reporting, and the two routes have nothing in common. A coach who sells the same session to an employee and to that employee’s company does not produce the same document in the two cases. If your checkout never asks, you will be settling it later, invoice by invoice, from memory.

The nature of the transaction, supply of goods, supply of services or a mixed operation, also becomes a mandatory detail. It is not decided invoice by invoice. It is decided once, product by product.

Open your catalogue and go down the list. Coaching, a software subscription, a training session: services. A printed book, a kit, anything you ship: goods. A downloadable file, a template, a video: still services, supplied electronically, not goods, even when it looks like a product. A bundle that mixes the two: a mixed operation, and the invoice has to say so.

Where it gets hard: down payments and subscriptions

A down payment is not a line in a spreadsheet, it is an invoice. It carries its own number, its own mandatory details, and it travels the same route as the closing invoice. Take part of the money at order time and you’re producing two electronic documents, not one.

Subscriptions raise a neighbouring question. Every renewal produces an invoice, and every mid-cycle move produces a credit note: a plan change, a partial refund, an early cancellation. All of them go back out through the same channel, carrying the same details. On a dozen customers you can hold that together by hand. On several hundred renewals a month you cannot.

Sort your catalogue once and you never come back to it. Sort it invoice by invoice and you come back to it every month.

Pick an invoice at random from last month and try to reconstruct it: where the order came from, which account the money landed in, which document went to the customer, where it is filed. Count the tools you had to open. That number is the honest measure of how ready you are.

Every hop from one tool to the next is a place where data goes missing or gets rekeyed wrong. While an invoice was a PDF sent by email, a typo in an address cost nothing: the customer worked it out. An electronic invoice is read by a machine that works nothing out. One wrong identifier and it comes back rejected.

The three links to weld

• The order carries the legal data. SIREN, delivery address, nature of the transaction: collected at purchase, not reconstructed afterwards.
• The payment attaches to the order. An orphan payment means an invoice you have to find by hand, and an Encaissée status that will never go out on its own.
• The invoice is generated from both. No export, no copy-paste, no intermediate file.

Your expert-comptable can help you frame the project and handle your edge cases. They can’t invent a SIREN nobody ever asked for. What reaches them is whatever your sales chain produced, and nothing else.

This is also the moment to look at what you still do by hand in day-to-day billing. Automating your invoices and your payment reminders is not a requirement of the reform, but it is the same job, done a year early and for better reasons.

Once deposited, your invoice sends statuses back. Four are mandatory and go up to the administration: Déposée, Rejetée, Refusée, Encaissée. Only two call for action on your side, and they call for very different action.

Rejetée: technical, and it is yours

A platform turned the file away. Bad format, a missing mandatory detail, a customer identifier the directory cannot find. Your customer will never see this invoice and their payment clock has not started. You fix it, you deposit it again, nobody else is involved. Deal with it the same day: while an invoice sits rejected, it can’t be paid.

Refusée: commercial, and it takes two

Your buyer disputes the substance. A quantity, a price, work that did not go as agreed. There is no file to fix: there is a call to make, and then, depending on how it goes, a credit note to issue and a new invoice to send. A refused invoice left sitting is an unpaid invoice, and it won’t wake up by itself.

Who is watching the inbox?

That’s the question most companies have no answer to. Statuses arrive somewhere, in an interface nobody has got into the habit of opening. Decide now who reads them and how often. A rejection left unanswered for weeks ends up costing far more than a format error, because by then it is not a format error any more, it is an unpaid invoice.

You sell, you get paid, you stay compliant. PayFacile was built for that long before the reform: your time goes to your business, not to administrative plumbing.

Take the four steps above again, and look at what is left for you to do when your sales already run through PayFacile.

• Your customer data arrives complete. Legal information is asked for at the right point of the checkout, from the people it applies to, and checked for you. Your private buyers see none of it.
• Your catalogue carries the information. What you sell is described once, and every invoice inherits it.
• The chain is already welded. Order, payment, invoice generated automatically, credit note, reminder: all in one place, with no rekeying and no export. And your invoices still look like yours.
• Format and transmission are our problem. Your invoices will go out in Factur-X, through the official channel, with nothing for you to configure.

All of it will be in place before the end of 2026. Pilot sellers go first, so the chain gets proven on real sales before it reaches everyone. That leaves you months of room before your own deadline, and on the day itself there is one setting to turn on.

One move we cannot make for you: designating the approved platform that will receive your suppliers’ invoices. The designation is made in your company’s name, not in ours. Mandatory since 1 September 2026, for every business, and done once.

Ten points. Tick them all and you’re ready well before 1 September 2027.

• A SIREN field exists in your order form and in your customer account area.
• Your recurring business customers have a SIREN on record.
• Every customer is tagged business or private.
• The delivery address is collected separately from the billing address, if you ship goods.
• Every catalogue line is classified as goods, services or a mixed operation.
• Your down payments produce a real numbered invoice, not a tracking line.
• Your credit notes come out of the same tool as your invoices.
• An order, its payment and its invoice can be found from a single screen.
• You know whether you took the option for paying VAT on debits.
• Someone is named to read the statuses and clear the rejections.

Nothing to download: the list is right here, it fits on one screen, and it will be up to date the next time you come back.

If it makes you sigh, the odds are your sales live in three tools that don’t talk to each other. Compare the PayFacile plans and start the 14-day trial: you’ll find out soon enough how many of those boxes tick themselves.