You live in London, New York, Montreal or Dubai, and your French SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible joint-stock company most foreign founders choose) or SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company with stricter statutory rules) sends its invoices as PDFs attached to emails. Your accountant in Paris has just warned you that this will no longer work: France is making electronic invoicing compulsory between businesses, with the first deadline on 1 September 2026. One of your French customers already refuses to pay a PDF invoice, another asks for your platform details, and you wonder whether a company run from abroad can even comply, what a non-compliant invoice will cost you, and how to force a customer to pay once the invoice is properly issued.

This guide answers those questions in order. It starts from the position of a foreign founder or foreign group doing business in France: the exact calendar that applies to your company depending on its size, how to receive and issue compliant invoices without living in France, which mandatory mentions every invoice must carry, which fines punish each mistake, and how to turn an unpaid invoice into cash through the French courts from abroad. Every decisive statement below is tied to the legal text or court decision it comes from, and the French acronyms you will meet along the way — SIREN (your company’s nine-digit identification number), Kbis (the official company identity certificate issued by the greffe, the clerk’s office of the commercial court), RNE (the Registre national des entreprises, the national business register fed through the INPI Single Desk, known as the Guichet unique), DGFIP (the Direction générale des finances publiques, the French tax administration), DGCCRF (the competition, consumer and anti-fraud authority that imposes administrative fines), ETI (entreprises de taille intermédiaire, intermediate-sized enterprises) and PME (petites et moyennes entreprises, small and medium enterprises) — are explained the first time they appear. If you are still setting up the structure itself, read our complete guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder first, then come back here once the Kbis is in your hands.

I. Meet the French e-invoicing deadline from abroad without bringing your billing to a halt

A. When must your French company receive and issue electronic invoices?

France is extending electronic invoicing to every domestic transaction between VAT-registered businesses, and the calendar is now published on the official portals. The business portal of the French administration states the issue obligation in plain terms: large companies and intermediate-sized enterprises (ETI) must issue electronic invoices from 1 September 2026, while small and medium enterprises (PME) and micro-enterprises follow from 1 September 2027 (service-public.fr guide on commercial invoicing rules). The tax administration confirms the same starting point on its dedicated reform page, which presents 1 September 2026 as the date from which electronic invoicing becomes the general rule between businesses (impots.gouv.fr e-invoicing reform page). In practice, that means September 2026 is the month your billing process changes, whatever the size of your company — only the direction of the obligation differs in the first year.

The distinction matters enormously for a small foreign-owned SAS or SARL. From 1 September 2026, every company, including the smallest, must be able to receive electronic invoices from its French suppliers: the tax administration’s timetable requires each business to have chosen a platform for receiving its suppliers’ invoices by 1 September 2026 (impots.gouv.fr e-invoicing reform page). Your suppliers will stop sending simple PDFs and will route their invoices through structured channels; if your company cannot receive them, your bookkeeping breaks, your accountant cannot recover the input VAT, and your suppliers’ payment reminders pile up in an inbox nobody monitors. The obligation to issue your own sales invoices in electronic format follows the size-based calendar: 1 September 2026 if your French company qualifies as large or intermediate-sized, 1 September 2027 if it is a PME or micro-enterprise. Most companies owned by a single foreign founder fall in the second group — the tax administration’s own guide describes a small business as one with fewer than 10 people and turnover or balance-sheet total of 2 million euros or less, and a medium-sized business as one with fewer than 250 people and turnover of 50 million euros or balance-sheet total of 43 million euros or less — but the reception duty still catches you in 2026, so there is no scenario in which a foreign founder can ignore next September.

Alongside invoicing itself comes a second duty with an easily missed name: e-reporting, the electronic transmission of transaction and payment data to the tax administration for operations that sit outside e-invoicing, such as sales to private consumers or cross-border transactions. The official timetable puts the transmission of transaction data at 1 September 2026 and the transmission of payment data at 1 September 2027. For a French company selling online to consumers across Europe while its owner lives in Singapore, e-reporting is the part of the reform that hurts first: the webshop’s consumer sales are not e-invoices, but their data must still reach the administration electronically. Your accountant’s software must therefore handle two flows — structured invoices to business customers through a platform, and data feeds to the administration for everything else — and the foreign owner who signs the software contract should verify in writing that both flows are covered before September 2026, not after the first penalty notice arrives at the company’s registered office (siège social) in France.

The legal backbone of these duties sits in the General Tax Code (CGI, Code général des impôts). The founding rule of French invoicing law is that every taxable business must ensure an invoice is issued for its business-to-business supplies: the Code states that “La facture est, en principe, émise dès la réalisation de la livraison ou de la prestation de services” (article 289 of the General Tax Code). The reform grafts the electronic form onto this existing duty, and the sanction for ignoring the new form is already written into the penalty article of the same Code: “Le non-respect par l’assujetti de l’obligation d’émission d’une facture sous une forme électronique dans les conditions prévues à l’article 289 bis donne lieu à l’application d’une amende de 50 € par facture, sans que le total des amendes appliquées au titre d’une même année civile puisse être supérieur à 15 000 €” (article 1737 of the General Tax Code). Fifty euros per invoice sounds modest until you multiply it by a year of monthly recurring invoices to forty French clients: the 15,000-euro annual ceiling is reached faster than most founders expect, and it stacks on top of the commercial-law fines described in Part II. The message for a company run from abroad is therefore simple: calendar the two dates now — 1 September 2026 for reception and, for larger structures, issuance, plus transaction e-reporting; 1 September 2027 for issuance by small companies and payment-data reporting — and treat them as hard as a tax return deadline.

B. How do you run compliant invoicing from London, New York or Dubai without living in France?

Nothing in the reform requires the founder to live in France, but everything in it requires the company to be reachable, identified and equipped there. Start with identification. A French company bills under its SIREN number and its intra-Community VAT number, both of which appear on the Kbis; a foreign customer or supplier that cannot find your company on the official registers will hesitate to pay or to contract. Registration itself is a dated legal duty: any person liable for VAT must, “Dans les quinze jours du commencement de ses opérations, souscrire au bureau désigné par un arrêté une déclaration conforme au modèle fourni par l’administration” (article 286 of the General Tax Code). In today’s procedure that declaration passes through the Single Desk (Guichet unique) to the RNE, and the foreign founder completes it with a certified translation of a passport, proof of the registered address in France, and the company’s articles. Once registered, the company files periodic VAT returns: “Tout redevable de la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée identifié conformément aux dispositions combinées des articles 286 ter et 286 ter A est tenu de remettre au service des impôts dont il dépend et dans le délai fixé par arrêté une déclaration conforme au modèle prescrit par l’administration” (article 287 of the General Tax Code). Monthly or quarterly depending on the regime, these returns are where the VAT shown on your electronic invoices is declared and where input VAT on your suppliers’ electronic invoices is recovered — which is exactly why the reception platform must feed the accounting software correctly.

The foreign-supplier situation deserves special attention because foreign groups constantly invoice their own French subsidiary, or are invoiced by it. When a supply is made by a business established outside France to a French VAT-registered customer, French law shifts the VAT burden to the French customer under the reverse-charge mechanism whenever the supply is made by a business established outside France to a customer acting as a taxable person identified for VAT in France (article 283 of the General Tax Code). Concretely, if your Dubai parent company bills management fees to your Paris SAS, the Paris company self-assesses the French VAT on its own return instead of paying VAT to Dubai — and the invoice must state the reverse charge clearly, or the auditor will treat the missing VAT as an anomaly. Mirror case: your French company’s invoice to a German VAT-registered customer for an intra-Community supply of goods carries no French VAT but must carry both VAT numbers and the reference to the exemption. These cross-border mentions sit next to the electronic format, not instead of it: a reverse-charge invoice between two businesses still travels through the e-invoicing circuit with the correct tax coding, and coding errors are the single most common ground for reassessment in newly equipped companies.

Organisation from abroad then follows four practical steps. First, designate in writing who does what: the foreign president or manager (président of a SAS, gérant of a SARL) signs a mandate authorising the French accountant to select the reception platform, configure the issuance flow and archive the invoices, while the founder keeps approval rights over the customer master data and the numbering sequence. Second, choose the platform before the summer of 2026: either the public invoicing portal operated by the administration or a certified private platform, both capable of exchanging structured invoices and transmitting the e-reporting data; the decisive question to ask the vendor, as a non-resident, is whether the interface and the support work in English and whether the platform handles your volumes of cross-border reverse-charge invoices. Third, clean the customer and supplier files now: SIREN numbers, VAT numbers, delivery addresses and billing addresses, because a structured invoice rejects what a PDF forgave, and rejected invoices mean late payments. Fourth, secure the mail and document circuit at the registered office: demands from the tax office, platform notifications and bailiff letters arrive in France while you sleep in another time zone, so a domiciliation agent or accountant with a written instruction to forward everything within 48 hours is not a luxury but part of the compliance chain. Companies that complete these four steps spend September 2026 checking dashboards; companies that skip them spend it explaining to customers why their invoices bounce.

II. Make every French invoice fines-proof and turn it into cash from abroad

A. Which mandatory mentions, payment deadlines and fines apply to each invoice?

French commercial law treats the invoice as a regulated document, and the electronic reform changes its carrier, not its content. The foundational rule has not moved: “Tout achat de produits ou toute prestation de service pour une activité professionnelle fait l’objet d’une facturation” (article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code). The same article lists what each invoice must show: the names and addresses of both parties, the billing address when it differs, the date of the sale or service, the quantity, the precise description and the unit price excluding VAT of the goods sold and services provided, any price reduction acquired at the date of sale and directly linked to the operation, the payment due date, the discount terms for early payment, the rate of late penalties and the amount of the flat-rate recovery fee. The seller issues the invoice when the delivery or service is performed, the buyer must claim it, and both sides keep a copy: “Le vendeur et l’acheteur conservent chacun un exemplaire de toute facture émise dans la limite de durée prévue par les dispositions applicables du code général des impôts.” For a foreign founder, the operational lesson is that the e-invoicing software must be configured with all of these fields as compulsory before the first invoice goes out — a platform that happily sends a structured invoice without the penalty rate or the recovery fee produces hundreds of defective invoices per year, each carrying its own fine.

The fines for defective invoicing are administrative, imposed by the DGCCRF without going through a court, and they scale brutally for companies: “Tout manquement au I est passible d’une amende administrative dont le montant ne peut excéder 75 000 € pour une personne physique et 375 000 € pour une personne morale” (article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code). Missing penalty rates, missing recovery fee, missing payment date, missing order number previously issued by the buyer — any of these triggers the fine, and repetition within two years doubles the ceiling. On top of this sits the tax fine for false or missing invoices: disguising the identity or address of suppliers or customers, issuing an invoice that does not match a real delivery or service, or failing to issue an invoice and to record the transaction exposes the company to a penalty equal to 50 percent of the sums concerned, with the professional customer jointly liable, capped at 375,000 euros per financial year (article 1737 of the General Tax Code). The foreign-owned company that lets its French manager issue accommodation invoices, or that records shareholder transfers as sales without invoices, walks directly into this provision — and the fact that the shareholder lives abroad has never stopped a reassessment served at the French registered office.

Payment deadlines are the second half of the same article, and they protect you as a supplier. Unless otherwise agreed, the price is payable thirty days after receipt of the goods or performance of the service; the agreed term “ne peut dépasser soixante jours après la date d’émission de la facture”, with a possible derogation of forty-five days end-of-month expressly stipulated in the contract and not constituting a manifest abuse toward the creditor (article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code). Any clause in your French customer’s purchasing terms that imposes ninety days end-of-month is therefore unenforceable against your company, and your invoice should state your own term — sixty days from issue is the standard protective choice — plus the late-penalty rate and the flat recovery fee. That fee is fixed by regulation at a round figure every founder should memorise: “Le montant de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement prévue au II de l’article L. 441-10 est fixé à 40 euros” (article D. 441-5 of the Commercial Code). Forty euros per unpaid invoice, due automatically without a reminder, plus penalties running from the day after the due date: on a portfolio of late-paying customers, the compliant invoice finances its own recovery, as the court decision below demonstrates.

B. How do you force a French customer to pay an unpaid invoice while living abroad?

Start from the position the courts take: a properly issued and assigned invoice gets paid. In a January 2026 decision, the Court of Appeal of Douai rejected every defence raised against an assigned invoice and held: “C’est ainsi à juste titre que les premiers juges ont retenu que la société Unik était redevable du montant de la créance cédée” (Court of Appeal of Douai, 8 January 2026, RG 24/03736). The debtor had argued about the underlying business relationship; the court confirmed the full 30,000 euros with interest from the date of the summons and capitalisation of interest. For a foreign supplier, the lesson is documentary: keep the signed contract or accepted quote, the delivery slips or intervention reports, the invoice with its mandatory mentions, and the proof that the customer never disputed it in writing. French judges order payment on papers, and papers can be assembled from abroad as easily as from Paris, provided the company kept them at the time instead of reconstructing them two years later.

The flat recovery fee then multiplies across the pile of unpaid invoices, and the courts award it invoice by invoice. In an October 2023 decision, the Court of Appeal of Paris dealt with 427 overdue invoices totalling 148,745.61 euros and ruled: “Condamne la SASU Microbaby à payer à l’EURL Cmultiserv la somme provisionnelle de 17.080 euros au titre de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement” (Court of Appeal of Paris, 19 October 2023, RG 23/03142). Seventeen thousand and eighty euros for 427 invoices is exactly 40 euros each — the regulation applied mechanically, without any need to prove actual collection costs. A foreign-owned company chasing twenty late invoices therefore adds 800 euros of automatic flat fees to its principal and penalties, before even counting additional compensation for proven higher costs. This is why the missing-fee invoices described in the previous section cost double: they expose you to the DGCCRF fine and they deprive you of the automatic recovery money when the customer defaults.

Procedure from abroad follows a clear ladder, and our companion guide walks through each rung with the forms and time limits: start with a formal demand letter (mise en demeure) sent with proof of delivery, then use the fast order-for-payment procedure (injonction de payer) before the commercial court for an invoice file the debtor cannot seriously contest, and file a full summons (assignation) where the customer disputes the work or invokes set-off (our guide to recovering an unpaid French invoice from abroad). Counsel in France files, appears and reports by email; the foreign founder signs the engagement letter, approves the claim computation and follows the timetable from home. Two practical warnings close this section. First, limitation: the standard five-year period runs from the due date of each invoice, so a 2021 invoice left dormant is already close to unenforceable — diary every invoice the month it falls due. Second, language: French courts work in French, so contracts, delivery notes and demands drafted bilingually from day one save months of sworn translation later. A company whose invoices are electronic, mentioned-complete and filed on time litigates from strength; a company whose invoices are PDF approximations with missing mentions litigates about its own paperwork before it ever reaches the debtor’s defences.

Conclusion

Electronic invoicing does not ask foreign founders to move to France; it asks their French company to bill like a French company. Choose the reception platform before 1 September 2026, issue structured invoices from September 2026 or September 2027 depending on the company’s size, feed the e-reporting flows for consumer and cross-border sales, and configure every mandatory mention — payment date, penalty rate, 40-euro recovery fee — as a compulsory field rather than an optional extra. The fines for skipping these steps are written, automatic and cumulative: 50 euros per non-electronic invoice up to 15,000 euros a year under tax law, up to 375,000 euros per company for missing mentions under commercial law. The rewards for respecting them are equally mechanical: penalties that run by operation of law, 40 euros per unpaid invoice without proof of costs, and judges who order payment on clean files. Run the checklist this quarter — platform, customer data, bilingual contract templates, mail forwarding at the registered office — and September 2026 becomes a software update instead of a crisis. Leave it to August 2026, and the first bounced invoice will teach the same lesson at ten times the price.