You formed a company in France, you run it from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, and your accountant has just written that from September 2026 every invoice must go through an approved platform. Meanwhile a French customer has not paid your last two invoices, and you wonder whether the penalties printed on your template are worth anything when you live five time zones away. Both questions belong to the same file: in France the invoice is at once a tax document supervised by the administration, the main evidence of your claim before the commercial court, and the trigger for automatic late-payment penalties. This guide explains, for a foreign founder or group managing a French company from abroad, how mandatory electronic invoicing works in practice, which platform and which data the tax office expects, what every invoice must contain to be enforceable, and how interest, the flat recovery fee and fines apply to your debtors and to you.

French acronyms appear everywhere in this area, so let us fix them once. The Kbis is the official extract proving your company exists, issued by the greffe, the registry office of the commercial court. URSSAF collects social contributions, while VAT is TVA in French and the French Tax Code is the CGI. For invoicing, a PDP (plateforme agréée) is a private e-invoicing platform registered with the tax administration, an OD (opérateur de dématérialisation) is a service provider that prepares or routes invoice data without being registered itself, and Chorus Pro is the portal reserved for invoices addressed to public bodies. E-reporting is the separate electronic transmission to the tax office of data on transactions that are not covered by e-invoicing, such as sales to private consumers or cross-border services. BODACC, the official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements, matters less here but you will meet it whenever a debtor goes into collective proceedings. Our general setup guide for foreign founders, covering the bank account, the Kbis, VAT and the first hire, is the hub of this series: Setting Up a Company in France as a Foreign Founder. The annual compliance calendar, with account approval, filing with the greffe and tax deadlines, is described in Your French Company Has a Legal Calendar.

I. How does mandatory e-invoicing work for your French company when you live abroad?

The reform is simple to state and demanding to implement: invoices between VAT taxpayers established in France must be issued, transmitted and received in electronic form through approved channels, and the data must reach the tax administration in real time. The obligation applies to your French company even if you personally live abroad, even if your customers are abroad in some configurations, and even if you have always invoiced from foreign accounting software. What changes is not only the PDF attached to an email but the channel, the format and the trace left with the administration. Understanding the timetable, the platform architecture and the e-reporting layer is the first half of the file.

A. Do you have to receive and issue electronic invoices from 1 September 2026?

Yes, and the starting point is reception. The tax administration announces on its e-invoicing page that from 1 September 2026 electronic invoicing is being generalized for transactions between businesses in France, which means every VAT taxpayer in France must at minimum be able to receive electronic invoices from its suppliers through a compliant channel by that date. The issue obligation follows a timetable phased by company size under article 26 of Law No. 2022-1157 of 16 August 2022 as amended: large companies and intermediate-sized companies issue electronically from 1 September 2026, while small and medium companies and micro-businesses switch their issuance one year later, on 1 September 2027. Your French subsidiary or SAS may well fall in the second group, but do not read the extra year as a holiday: you must still receive compliant invoices from September 2026, register in the central directory (annuaire) so suppliers can route invoices to you, and transmit e-reporting data described below.

The scope is business-to-business domestic transactions between VAT taxpayers. Sales to private consumers, exempt transactions under articles 261 to 261 E of the CGI, certain intra-EU supplies and export sales follow e-reporting rather than e-invoicing, which is why your company can face both duties at once: e-invoices to your French business customers, e-reporting for the rest. Foreign groups sometimes assume a branch or a company directed from abroad escapes the reform; it does not. The criterion is the VAT position in France, not the residence of the director. If your French SAS or SARL is liable for VAT in France, identified by a SIREN number and registered with the tax office, it is inside the reform whatever passport its president holds and wherever board calls take place. Conversely, pure flows from your foreign parent to the French subsidiary are cross-border transactions handled through e-reporting and, where relevant, the reverse-charge mechanism, not through domestic e-invoicing.

The legal backbone sits in the CGI. The general invoicing duty is stated at article 289 of the CGI: “Tout assujetti est tenu de s’assurer qu’une facture est émise, par lui-même, ou en son nom et pour son compte, par son client ou par un tiers”. Every taxable person must ensure an invoice is issued, by himself or in his name and on his behalf by his customer or a third party. The same article historically allowed electronic invoices in any electronic form with the recipient’s acceptance and required authenticity of origin, integrity of content and readability from issue until the end of conservation. The reform inserts the new articles 289 bis to 289 E into that framework: domestic B2B invoices must now travel as structured data through an approved platform, with the administration receiving the core data at the same time. Registration duties start earlier in the CGI as well: article 286 of the CGI provides that “Toute personne assujettie à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée doit : 1° Dans les quinze jours du commencement de ses opérations, souscrire”, every VAT person must file a commencement declaration within fifteen days of starting operations. A foreign founder who starts billing French customers before the French VAT registration is filed is therefore already in breach on two fronts: no registration and no compliant channel.

Practical consequences for a company run from abroad are immediate. First, designate who in France or abroad operates the invoicing flow: the foreign director alone with an online account is fragile, because holidays, departures and lost credentials interrupt issuance and the deadlines keep running. Second, check that your accounting software either connects to a registered platform or is replaced for French flows; a foreign ERP that produces handsome PDFs but cannot emit Factur-X, UBL or CII structured formats and cannot route through a PDP leaves you outside the reform even though your invoices look professional. Third, register the company in the central directory with its SIREN, its platform choice and its routing data, because suppliers will look you up there before sending. Fourth, align the VAT registration, the bank account in the company’s name and the platform subscription early: our experience is that foreign-owned companies lose the most time on the bank and Kbis sequence described in the setup hub, and the e-invoicing registration queues behind the same documents. Companies based in Paris and Île-de-France face one additional practical point: the Paris commercial registry and the local tax offices process large volumes of foreign-owned files, so allow several weeks between the Kbis issuance and a fully routed platform account, and keep evidence of each step for the file.

Two common misunderstandings should be corrected now. A PDF sent by ordinary email is not e-invoicing under the reform, even with an electronic signature: the issue is not the look of the document but the structured format and the platform routing that feeds the administration. And Chorus Pro, the portal many foreign groups discovered when billing a French municipality or hospital, covers only invoices to the public sector; it does not make your B2B flows compliant. Private domestic B2B invoices must go through a registered platform (directly or via an OD connected to one), with the directory routing and the statuses — deposited, received, accepted, refused — tracked inside that circuit.

B. Which platform, which format and which data must you send to the tax office?

The architecture has three actors. The registered platforms (PDP) are accredited by the administration, route invoices between suppliers and customers, extract the tax data and forward it to the administration, and manage the directory entries and life-cycle statuses. Dematerialisation operators (OD) provide software and services — composing invoices, converting formats, connecting an ERP — but route through a PDP rather than directly to the administration. Your company chooses either a direct PDP subscription or an OD linked to a PDP, and the choice is recorded in the directory so that any French supplier can find your delivery address. Price, languages, multi-entity management for groups, and the quality of the English interface vary widely; for a company run from abroad, insist on an English-language console, multi-user rights with an audit trail, and a support team that answers outside French office hours, because the invoice that blocks a month-end close always arrives on a Friday evening.

Formats are the second layer. France accepts the three European-standard syntaxes of the Factur-X / UBL / CII family, with a minimum structured core and optional profiles carrying more data. In practice your platform or OD converts your ERP output into the compliant format and validates it before routing. Keep the validation reports: when a customer claims never to have received an invoice, the platform logs and statuses are the evidence that it was deposited, routed and made available. Also keep the underlying commercial data consistent between the ERP and the platform — amounts, VAT rates, references — because discrepancies between management accounts and transmitted data are exactly what later controls compare.

The third layer is e-reporting, governed by article 290 of the CGI, which states: “Les assujettis qui sont établis ou ont leur domicile ou leur résidence habituelle en France communiquent à l’administration sous forme électronique”, taxable persons established or domiciled in France transmit data to the administration electronically. E-reporting covers transactions outside domestic e-invoicing: sales to non-taxable persons (retail, B2C), exempt intra-EU supplies, services located abroad, and payment data. The administration’s timetable distinguishes transaction data, due from 1 September 2026, from payment data, due from 1 September 2027. A French company selling both to French businesses and to consumers or foreign customers therefore runs two rails in parallel from 2026: e-invoices through the platform for domestic B2B, plus periodic electronic transmission of the other turnover. Foreign directors frequently discover this second rail late, because B2C and export sales felt untouched by an invoicing reform. They are not: the turnover must still be reported electronically, and the penalties for missing e-reporting mirror the logic of the e-invoicing fines.

Sanctions give the architecture its teeth, and they apply per invoice. Article 1737 of the CGI provides: “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 €.” Fifty euros per non-compliant invoice, capped at 15,000 euros per calendar year — a company issuing thirty non-compliant invoices a month reaches the cap within a year without any other breach. The same article fines platforms that fail to transmit data, which means your provider has skin in the game but also that a failing provider does not shield you: keep your own copies and your own transmission proofs. Reception has its own escalating ladder: where the administration finds that a taxable person refuses to use a registered platform for receiving electronic invoices, it first issues a formal demand to comply within three months — “elle le met en demeure de s’y conformer dans un délai de trois mois” — and persistence then draws “l’application d’une amende de 500 €”, renewed at 1,000 euros after each further unsuccessful three-month demand. A company that ignores reception therefore accumulates formal notices before the fines, which is precisely the paper trail that makes later disputes hard to win: the administration will produce its demands with acknowledgements of receipt. Tolerance for a first infringement exists in narrow terms at the end of article 1737, but it is a clemency for an isolated first failure, not a strategy for a company issuing hundreds of invoices a year.

Document retention closes the loop. Article L123-22 of the Commercial Code requires: “Les documents comptables et les pièces justificatives sont conservés pendant dix ans.” Accounting documents and supporting records are kept for ten years. Invoices, platform logs, validation reports, directory registrations and e-reporting acknowledgements all belong to that ten-year file. A director living abroad should ensure the archive survives his own movements: company-controlled storage, not a personal mailbox; access rights for the successor director and the accountant; and exports in readable form, because a platform subscription cancelled in 2028 must not take the 2026 evidence with it. Tax controls in this area are documentary and often remote — the inspector asks for files, compares transmitted data with declared turnover, and assesses from the desk. The company that produces structured archives answers in days; the company that searches personal emails answers in months, with penalties accruing.

II. How do you keep invoices that prove payment and survive a French control?

Compliant transmission is only half the battle. The invoice must also carry the mandatory particulars that make it enforceable, trigger the right payment deadline, and support late-payment interest and recovery costs before a French court. Foreign templates frequently fail here: missing penalty rate, missing purchase-order number, payment date absent, or a single document that mixes deposit, balance and credit note in ways French law reads as separate instruments. And when the debtor does not pay, the same invoice becomes exhibit number one in the recovery — provided it was accepted, unprotested and consistent with delivery. This second part turns the compliant flow into an enforceable claim.

A. What must every French invoice contain to be enforceable between businesses?

Commercial law states the principle bluntly at article L441-9 of the Commercial Code: “Tout achat de produits ou toute prestation de service pour une activité professionnelle fait l’objet d’une facturation.” Every purchase of products or provision of services for a professional activity must be invoiced — and the provision adds: “L’acheteur est tenu de la réclamer.” The buyer must demand it. Invoicing is therefore not a courtesy between businesses but a bilateral legal duty, breach of which exposes each side to an administrative fine. The article then lists the compulsory mentions: names and addresses of the parties including the billing address where different, date of sale or service, quantity, precise description, unit price excluding VAT, reductions acquired at the date of sale and directly linked to the transaction, the date by which payment must be made, discount terms for early payment, the penalty rate due from the day after the payment date shown on the invoice, the flat recovery indemnity due on late payment, the date payment is deemed made (funds placed at the beneficiary’s disposal), and the purchase-order number where the buyer previously issued one. Paper invoices are drawn up in duplicate and each party keeps its copy within the tax time limits.

Each of these lines has litigation value. The penalty rate and the recovery indemnity must appear on the invoice itself to be claimed smoothly; courts apply them where they are shown and the deadline is stated, and argue about them where they are missing. The payment date determines the starting point of interest: French law reads “payable on receipt” or a blank field against the statutory default rather than in your favour. The precise description and quantity link the invoice to delivery: an invoice for “services — balance” with no period, no order reference and no timesheet invites the debtor to dispute what was delivered, while an invoice mirroring the contract vocabulary, the order number and the delivery slips leaves little room. The purchase-order number deserves special attention in groups: French buyers in industry and retail often refuse to pay invoices that omit it, and their refusal is then contractual rather than dilatory — your claim fails on your own omission. For a company run from abroad, the operational fix is a bilingual invoice template validated once by counsel, locked in the ERP so sales staff cannot delete the penalty block, and mirrored in the platform mapping so the structured data carries the same mentions as the human-readable image.

Between merchants, an accepted and unprotested invoice carries real probative weight. The Toulouse Court of Appeal recently restated the commercial logic in a dispute between two building-trade companies, where the supplier argued that business relations between merchants exclude formalism and that producing invoices, absent any challenge, suffices to establish the claim within an established commercial relationship: see CA Toulouse, 16 September 2025, No. 24/01051. French courts do not treat every invoice as an enforceable title — a contested invoice must be corroborated by contracts, delivery notes, correspondence and performance — but a chain of consistent invoices, never protested, supported by delivery and followed by part-payments or acknowledgements, routinely carries the case. The Court of Cassation supervises this evidence from above: in a 2021 commercial decision it rejected a challenge built on invoicing disputes by holding the grounds manifestly incapable of leading to cassation, leaving the court of appeal’s assessment of the invoice bundle intact: see Cass. com., 17 November 2021, No. 20-15.428. The lesson for foreign creditors is practical rather than theoretical: protest quickly when you receive a wrong invoice from a supplier, and build your own invoices as a bundle — contract, order, delivery proof, invoice, reminders — from day one, because the judge will read the bundle, not the invoice alone.

Credit notes, deposits and periodic invoices follow the CGI rhythm recalled above: invoices are in principle issued upon performance, with monthly periodic invoices allowed for same-month supplies to the same customer, and any document amending the initial invoice and referring to it specifically is treated as an invoice carrying the same mentions. Deposits received before performance must themselves be invoiced, a point foreign service companies miss when they bill only the final balance. And where the customer is a French business, self-billing or third-party issuance is possible only under mandate, with acceptance — do not let a customer “handle the invoicing” informally, or you will discover at the control that the mandate, the acceptance and the audit trail are all missing.

B. How do late-payment penalties, the 40-euro fee and fines apply to you?

Payment deadlines in France are capped by statute, not left to bargaining power. Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code sets the default at thirty days after receipt of goods or performance, allows agreed terms up to sixty days from invoice date, and tolerates forty-five days end-of-month only where expressly stipulated and not manifestly abusive toward the creditor. Periodic invoices have their own forty-five-day cap. Any clause exceeding these ceilings is vulnerable, and administrative fines punish the stipulation itself. For the foreign supplier this is protective: a French customer imposing ninety-day terms in general conditions cannot enforce them against you, and you can claim the statutory regime instead. For your French company as buyer, it is restrictive: the payment terms you grant your own suppliers and the terms printed on your purchase orders must fit the same ceilings, or you create liability on the purchasing side while chasing debtors on the sales side.

Interest runs automatically. Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code provides: “Les pénalités de retard sont exigibles sans qu’un rappel soit nécessaire.” Late penalties are due without any reminder being necessary. The rate, stated in your general conditions and repeated on each invoice, defaults by law to the European Central Bank refinancing rate plus ten points where the parties agreed nothing, and cannot be set below three times the legal interest rate. It accrues from the day after the payment date shown on the invoice. No formal notice is needed to trigger it, which surprises common-law founders used to demand letters: in France the clock starts on the paper, not on the reminder. The companion guide to recovering an unpaid invoice from abroad, with the injunction-to-pay (injonction de payer) procedure before the commercial court, is here: Your French Customer Does Not Pay While You Live Abroad.

The flat recovery indemnity completes the mechanism. Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code adds: “Tout professionnel en situation de retard de paiement est de plein droit débiteur, à l’égard du créancier, d’une indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement, dont le montant est fixé par décret.” Every professional in late payment owes the creditor, as of right, a flat recovery indemnity fixed by decree. Article D441-5 of the Commercial Code fixes it: “Le montant de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement prévue au II de l’article L. 441-10 est fixé à 40 euros.” Forty euros per late invoice, due automatically alongside interest, with the creditor entitled to claim documented additional recovery costs on top where the 40 euros do not cover them. The Court of Cassation polices the boundary of this indemnity strictly. On 17 September 2026 the Second Civil Chamber held, on articles L441-10 II and D441-5: “Aux termes du premier de ces textes, tout professionnel en situation de retard de paiement est de plein droit débiteur, à l’égard du créancier, d’une indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement.” And: “Selon le second, le montant de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement prévue au II de l’article L. 441-10 est fixé à 40 euros.” It then excluded insurance indemnities from the device, holding: “Il en résulte que l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement dont est débiteur de plein droit tout professionnel en situation de retard de paiement, à l’égard du créancier n’est pas applicable en cas de retard de paiement d’une indemnité d’assurance indemnisant des dommages.” The indemnity covers commercial payment delays, not insurance claim settlements — a distinction that matters when your French company both trades and insures: see Cass. 2nd civ., 17 September 2026, No. 24-22.899. Where the indemnity does apply, it applies invoice by invoice, without reminder, and the debtor cannot defeat it by arguing it received no demand.

Enforcement from abroad follows the ordinary French recovery ladder, now fed by platform evidence. A formal demand letter (mise en demeure) remains the commercial starting point and fixes the undisputed narrative, though interest already runs. The European order for payment and the French injonction de payer before the president of the commercial court then allow an order on papers — contract, order, delivery proofs, platform transmission logs, account statements — without an initial hearing, which is why the bundle described above matters: the judge grants the order where the file is complete and refuses it where the invoice stands alone. Opposition by the debtor sends the case to a full hearing, where the same bundle, plus correspondence showing absence of protest, usually decides. Costs and the article 700 allowance follow success, and the 40-euro indemnities accumulate per invoice alongside interest. Parallel criminal exposure exists only at the margins — knowingly issuing false invoices draws the 50-percent fine of article 1737 I and, in serious cases, prosecution — but ordinary late payment remains civil and commercial: interest, indemnity, order, enforcement by a bailiff (commissaire de justice).

Companies in Paris and Île-de-France litigate these claims mainly before the Paris commercial court, whose judges handle heavy volumes of invoice disputes involving foreign parties and expect translated exhibits, complete chains and platform logs rather than narrative assertions. Proceedings can largely be conducted through counsel without the director flying in for every hearing, but powers of attorney, identity documents and, where needed, an apostille on foreign corporate authorisations should be prepared early. Elsewhere in France the same procedures run before the local commercial court of the debtor’s seat or the contractually agreed forum. In all cases, limitation, insolvency and foreign-bank-account enforcement add layers: if the debtor enters safeguard or liquidation, declare the claim within two months of the BODACC notice through your representative; if enforcement must reach assets outside France, the French order circulates under the European enforcement instruments or the applicable convention. None of this requires residence in France. All of it requires papers in order, deadlines calendared, and counsel instructed before the claim ages.

Conclusion

France now supervises your invoices twice: as tax data flowing through approved platforms to the administration, and as commercial evidence before the courts. The foreign director who masters both circuits — registered platform and directory entry from September 2026, structured formats, e-reporting for the rest of turnover, locked templates carrying every mandatory mention, bundles that link each invoice to delivery, and systematic claims for automatic interest and the 40-euro indemnity — turns compliance into an asset: faster payment, cleaner controls and orders granted on papers. The director who keeps emailing PDFs from foreign software with incomplete mentions manufactures the opposite: 50-euro fines per invoice, formal demands for reception failures, debtors who dispute vague invoices, and judges who refuse orders on thin files. The reform rewards early movers: choose the platform now, register the directory entry, align the ERP mapping, backfill the ten-year archive, and put the penalty block on every template. Run from abroad with French papers in order, the company invoices, reports and collects like a local; run on foreign habits, it pays like a stranger. The difference is decided this autumn, one invoice at a time.

Need a quick opinion on your case

Setting up e-invoicing for your French company from abroad, or chasing unpaid French invoices with penalties and recovery fees? Our firm offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm, in English, for companies in Paris and Île-de-France as well as founders based anywhere abroad. Telephone consultation: 80 EUR including VAT (TTC). Call 06 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page with your Kbis, a sample invoice and a short description of your platform, your customers and the sums at stake.