France e-invoicing 2026: who must issue, who must receive

Your large suppliers, your telecom operator, your energy provider now issue their invoices in a structured electronic format. That has been their obligation since 1 September 2026. It is not yours. Yours, if you run an SME, is being able to receive them.

This is French law. The test is not what language you run your business in, or where your shareholders sit: it is whether your company is established in France and assujettie à la TVA, a taxable person for VAT purposes. If that describes your company, everything below applies to you in full.

Two obligations start, and they do not target the same companies.

Receiving concerns everyone. Every business subject to VAT and established in France must be able to receive structured electronic invoices, through an approved platform. There’s no threshold of size, revenue or legal form.

Issuing, for now, concerns only large companies and ETI (entreprises de taille intermédiaire, the mid-size band that sits above SMEs). They issue their invoices in a structured electronic format and send their transaction data to the tax administration. SMEs, very small businesses, micro-entreprises and the self-employed have until 1 September 2027.

That is the most common confusion on the subject: on that date, only receiving is universal.

The reform requires three standard formats, all of them machine readable:

• Factur-X: a PDF/A-3 that a human can read, carrying an XML file that a machine can read. It is the most widespread format, and the most accessible to small operations.
• UBL (Universal Business Language): an international standard already in use in B2B exchanges.
• CII (Cross Industry Invoice): a UN/CEFACT standard, common in industry and in the European public sector.

A plain PDF emailed to your customer is not an electronic invoice in the sense of the reform. It becomes one only when it carries the structured data the tax administration requires.

What changes is not going digital, which most companies did years ago. It is the structured format, and the trip through a platform the state has approved.

The timeline of the reform comes down to two dates.

1 September 2026

• Receiving: every business subject to VAT. No size exemption.
• Issuing and e-reporting: large companies and ETI.

1 September 2027

• Issuing and e-reporting: SMEs, very small businesses, micro-entreprises and the self-employed.

The categories follow the classification in décret n° 2008-1354, the French decree that defines company size:

• Large company: at least 5,000 employees, or more than €1.5 billion in revenue and more than €2 billion in balance sheet total.
• ETI: 250 to 4,999 employees, with revenue not exceeding €1.5 billion.
• SME: fewer than 250 employees, with revenue not exceeding €50 million.

One point regularly gets forgotten: auto-entrepreneurs and businesses under the franchise en base de TVA are in scope. They are not redevables, they charge no VAT and remit none, but they are assujettis, taxable persons. The reform targets taxable persons, so they fall inside the perimeter, receiving included. That covers freelancers and auto-entrepreneurs who collect recurring payments.

The timeline has already slipped once. The obligation was originally due to start in July 2024. The postponement was written into a finance act (loi de finances), and it is indeed the September 2026 and September 2027 dates that apply.

If you run an SME, you don’t have to issue anything yet. But you already have to be able to receive.

The reform rests on two separate pillars. Confusing them produces either duplicates or gaps in what you declare.

e-invoicing, the electronic invoice itself

It covers domestic B2B: transactions between two businesses subject to VAT and established in France. Each invoice has to be issued in one of the three structured formats, then transmitted by an approved platform. It no longer travels straight from you to your customer.

e-reporting, the transmission of data

It covers everything else:

• sales to consumers (B2C);
• international operations: intra-community supplies and acquisitions, exports.

Here there’s no structured invoice per sale. You send the tax administration transaction and payment data, aggregated by day, by VAT rate and by type of operation. The frequency depends on your VAT regime: three times a month, monthly, or every two months. While you are in there, check that your tax profiles reflect the cases you really have.

This distinction decides a great deal, depending on what you sell. An online retailer, a coach or a creator selling almost exclusively to consumers will not produce a Factur-X invoice per sale. Their main obligation is e-reporting, a much lighter load.

Invoices to the public sector (B2G) do not change. They keep going through Chorus Pro, mandatory since 2020.

Start by splitting your revenue between domestic B2B, international B2B and B2C. That split decides which of the two obligations is yours, and in what proportion.

No, and it is the change that most articles published before the end of 2024 missed.

The PPF no longer lets you invoice

The Portail Public de Facturation (PPF), the state invoicing portal, was originally meant to provide a minimum issuing and receiving service, free of charge. After the state refocused on the official directory project, that service was dropped. Companies can no longer count on the PPF for their invoicing. Its role now centres on the directory, on the data concentrator, and on collecting VAT and e-reporting information for the DGFiP, the French public finances directorate.

The consequence is direct: there is no free public platform for issuing and receiving. Going through an approved platform is mandatory. The tax administration writes it without ambiguity: only an approved platform is authorised to provide the full set of functions the reform covers, for electronic invoicing and for e-reporting. The original, worth keeping if you go looking on impots.gouv.fr: « Seule une plateforme agréée est habilitée à assurer toutes les fonctionnalités prévues par la réforme en matière de facturation électronique et de e-reporting. »

Don’t confuse the PPF with Chorus Pro. Chorus Pro remains the platform where the public sector receives its supplier invoices, for B2G exchanges.

The plateforme agréée, formerly the PDP

A plateforme agréée (PA), an approved platform, is a private operator registered by the DGFiP after review against a strict set of requirements. Until 2025 it was called a plateforme de dématérialisation partenaire (PDP), and you will still see that acronym everywhere. More than 140 platforms are registered to date. Registrations were first granted provisionally, with confirmation depending on interoperability tests with the public portal and with the other platforms.

An approved platform transmits your invoices and takes care of your e-reporting. It usually adds services on top: automatic reconciliation, API integration with your accounting tool, credit note handling, status tracking.

An OD on its own is not enough

An opérateur de dématérialisation (OD), a dematerialisation operator, is any provider offering dematerialisation services: invoicing tool, accounting software, scanning, point-of-sale software. An OD is not registered and does not appear in the directory. It can neither issue nor receive on your behalf: it has to rely on an approved platform.

The directory, the piece that makes routing possible

The state is building a directory listing every business subject to VAT, with the details of the platform each one has mandated for receiving. That is what lets your supplier’s invoice arrive in the right place. Every business therefore has to designate an approved platform and be listed in the directory, even if it is expecting no electronic invoice at all for the moment.

With more than 140 registered platforms, the choice comes down to five criteria.

• 1. Registration. Check that the vendor appears on the official list the DGFiP publishes on impots.gouv.fr. That is the one non-negotiable point.
• 2. Functionality. A simple invoicing tool, pre-accounting, or full accounting production? What productivity does it give you back, and on which task?
• 3. Getting your data out. Ask how you retrieve your invoices and your history the day you leave. The answer to that question tells you more about a vendor than its security page does.
• 4. Simplicity. Ask for a demo or a trial period. The tool has to suit you and your customers alike.
• 5. Price. Monthly or annual subscription, pricing by invoice volume, and above all: is the cost of electronic invoicing passed on to you or not?

One technical point often decides the rest: the connection between the platform and the tool that produces your invoices. A platform that is not wired into your software will have you fetching supporting documents by hand. Favour a proven API, or a platform built natively into the tool you already use.

Prices recorded on 1 September 2026

The rates below are the ones we recorded at the date of publication. Check the current grid before you sign.

• Pennylane: a micro-entreprise plan at €0, limited to one user and 1,200 invoices a year. Then €7 excl. VAT per month (Starter), €14 (Basique), €24 (Essentiel) and €79 (Premium, with the accounting module). Electronic invoicing is included at no extra cost in every plan, the free one included.
• Sellsy: an approved platform, priced per user with a minimum of two licences. The vendor publishes no public grid and gives its prices on request.
• Axonaut: an approved platform since January 2026, entry price recorded at around €35 excl. VAT per month, everything included, with a discount for an annual commitment.

The advice that comes back from everyone working on the reform: use a single platform rather than several. You centralise your invoices and your data in one place, you get a complete view of your VAT, and you keep your subscription costs down.

A badly fitting tool at €0 costs more in manual corrections than a €25 a month subscription. Judge it on how it fits your business cases, not on the sticker price.

Companies that bill by subscription run into constraints the reform was not designed to make easy. Where a tradesperson issues a few dozen invoices a month, a SaaS vendor or a training platform generates hundreds of them, automatically, with pro rata amounts and plan changes mid-cycle.

Three friction points

• Credit notes. Every partial refund, every plan change triggers a credit note. Each of those documents follows the same circuit as the invoice: structured format, transmission by an approved platform. Handling them by hand stops being realistic past a handful a month.
• Multiple currencies. If you bill in dollars or in pounds, the conversion into euros has to appear in the structured flow. Your invoicing engine has to put that data in without you touching it.
• Intra-community VAT. B2B sales into the European Union and B2C sales that fall under the OSS one-stop shop are not subject to domestic electronic invoicing, but they do fall under e-reporting. Mixing up the two regimes exposes you to duplicates or to omissions.

If you sell to consumers, your load is lighter

You won’t have to produce a Factur-X invoice per sale. Your obligation is the e-reporting of your transaction data. It is a genuine load, but far lighter than the words “electronic invoice” lead you to fear.

What PayFacile is preparing

Today, your invoices are generated automatically on every sale you collect through PayFacile, and you can already customise your invoices. Our job, between now and the deadlines that concern you, is to make that machinery compliant without forcing you to rebuild your invoicing somewhere else. What that involves:

• collecting and checking the missing legal information, at the moment it is needed;
• producing your invoices in Factur-X where it is required;
• routing them through an approved platform;
• transmitting the e-reporting on your sales to consumers.

We are not giving a date here, and that is deliberate: we will publish one when it is a date we can hold. What we are aiming for comes down to this: that the switch is a setting to turn on, not a project to run. In the meantime, you can already automate your invoicing and your payment reminders.

For a subscription business, compliance is not settled in the accounting software. It is settled in the billing engine. That is the piece that has to speak the language of the approved platforms.

The fines have changed. The penalty went from €15 to €50 per invoice, and from €250 to €500 per missing e-reporting transmission. If you’ve read a lower figure somewhere else, it dates from the previous version of the text.

The obligation to issue in electronic format is set by article 289 bis of the Code général des impôts, the French tax code. The penalty itself sits in article 1737, III: a fine of €50 per invoice not issued in electronic form, with the total capped at €15,000 per calendar year.

For e-reporting, article 1788 D sets a fine of €500 per transmission not made, capped in the same way at €15,000 per calendar year. An approved platform that fails its own transmission obligations faces €750 per transmission, up to €100,000.

One point often goes unmentioned, and it matters: the first infringement in a four-year period is not penalised if it is put right spontaneously, or within thirty days of a first request from the administration. The reform does allow for some tolerance on the way in.

The fine is not the real stake

The main risk comes from automated data cross-checking. Every invoice transmitted by an approved platform feeds straight into DGFiP systems. In practice:

• matching issuer against receiver: a gap between the VAT you declare and the invoices received by your customers raises a flag;
• identifier checks: the administration can verify that the issuing SIREN exists and corresponds to a real activity;
• deadline checks: any delay in transmission becomes visible immediately.

This cross-checking is the point: fighting VAT fraud is one of the four objectives the government has set out for the reform. You no longer invoice in your own corner, you invoice inside a system that compares.

If you are starting from zero, the order of operations counts for more than speed.

• Step 1. Designate an approved platform and get yourself listed in the directory. It is the minimum action and the most urgent one, since it is the thing that lets you receive at all.
• Step 2. Map your invoicing flows. Identify every channel that produces data to transmit: invoicing tool, point-of-sale software, online shop, payment platform. Count your monthly volume, note your formats, and split your revenue between domestic B2B, international B2B and B2C.
• Step 3. Go through your internal processes. Approval circuits, accounting treatment, archiving, and the special cases: self-billing, intra-group, factoring, down payments, credit notes.
• Step 4. Check that your tools interoperate. Your vendor should have published its roadmap by now. If your tool has nothing planned for connecting to an approved platform, you’ll have to change it.
• Step 5. Set yourself figures to hit. Estimate what processing one invoice costs you as things stand, compare it with automated processing, and multiply the gap by your volume. That calculation is what turns a regulatory constraint into a project worth running.

Don’t copy a peer’s method: every company is a special case. Your accountant, your expert-comptable, is best placed to fill in the rest.

What you gain by not waiting

The state puts the expected gains for very small businesses and SMEs at €4.5 billion a year once the reform is fully in place. Take it for what it is: an administration estimate, over a horizon nobody has specified. The gain you can check for yourself is smaller and more certain: the time you spend rekeying, chasing and filing. Depending on your situation, the state’s France Num scheme can help fund the transition.

For an SME, the year ahead is not a grace period. It is the window to choose a tool, test it and break it in before the obligation to issue applies, on 1 September 2027, without turning it into an emergency in August.