You formed a company in France, you run it from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, and your accountant writes to tell you that French invoicing has changed. Since 1 September 2026 your French company must be able to receive electronic invoices, whatever its size, and depending on its size it must already issue them in structured electronic format too. The reform is not a technical detail for your IT provider. It changes how you prove your sales, how you recover value added tax (VAT, the French TVA), how fast your customers must pay you, and which penalties you face if an invoice is missing or wrong. This article explains, for a foreign founder or a foreign group with a French subsidiary, what the reception duty means in practice when you live abroad, when the issuing duty catches your company, and how the strict French rules on invoice content and late payment turn each invoice into a weapon you can use before the commercial court, including the Paris business court (the Tribunal des activités économiques de Paris, which replaced the former Tribunal de commerce de Paris).

French acronyms appear throughout this article and each one is explained on first use: the DGFiP (Direction générale des Finances publiques, the French tax authority), the ETI (entreprise de taille intermédiaire, mid-size company), the ECB (European Central Bank, BCE in French), VAT (TVA in French), and the Kbis (the official registration certificate of a French company, issued by the greffe, the registry of the commercial court). The founding steps, bank account, Kbis and VAT registration of a foreign-owned French company are covered in our general guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, and the VAT mechanics behind each invoice are detailed in our companion article on VAT registration, thresholds, invoicing and returns.

I. Since 1 September 2026 Your French Company Must Receive Electronic Invoices, Wherever You Live

A. Why every French company must now receive e-invoices and what changes for an owner abroad

The French Ministry of the Economy dates the entry into force of the business-to-business electronic invoicing reform to 1 September 2026, and the tax authority describes electronic invoicing as generalised between businesses from that date. Generalised between businesses means business-to-business domestic transactions. Invoices to private individuals and invoices to foreign companies established outside France follow different reporting tracks, but your French company sits inside the system for everything it buys from and sells to other French taxable businesses.

The calendar has two steps and the official page describes them precisely. First, every business regardless of size must be able to receive electronic invoices. That reception duty applies from 1 September 2026 to every company, including a one-person SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible joint-stock company most foreign founders choose) owned entirely from abroad. Second, the issuing duty depends on size: large and mid-size companies issue all their invoices electronically and transmit e-reporting data from September 2026, while small and micro-businesses switch to electronic issuing and e-reporting from 1 September 2027. Most foreign founders start with a small company, so the practical picture is simple: you must receive now, you must issue by September 2027, and if your French subsidiary grows past the mid-size thresholds the issuing duty arrives sooner.

The administration has announced that the launch phase will be handled with a supportive and tolerant enforcement stance toward companies facing difficulties at the starting date. Tolerance is not an exemption. It means the administration will support companies that are equipping themselves, not that it will ignore companies that do nothing. A foreign shareholder who treats the reform as a French problem for later takes a double risk: supplier invoices that never reach the company because no reception channel was set up, and customer invoices issued outside the mandated format that a serious client refuses to pay.

The tax foundation of the reform sits in the General Tax Code (Code général des impôts, the CGI). Article 289 of that code provides that “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” for supplies of goods and services to another taxable person. An assujetti is a VAT taxable person, namely a business subject to VAT rules. The same article gives electronic invoices full legal dignity: “Les factures électroniques sont émises et reçues sous une forme électronique quelle qu’elle soit. Elles tiennent lieu de factures d’origine pour l’application de l’article 286 et du présent article.” An electronic invoice is therefore not a copy of a paper original. It is the original, and it supports both your accounts and your VAT deductions under article 286 of the same code, which requires every VAT taxable person to declare the start of operations within fifteen days: “Toute personne assujettie à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée doit : 1° 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.” Foreign founders sometimes discover this declaration late, when the first invoice already needs a VAT number that does not exist yet. Register first, invoice second.

B. How to receive and issue from abroad: accredited platform, structured format, language and currency

A PDF attached to an email is not an electronic invoice within the meaning of the reform. The mandated invoice travels through an accredited platform (plateforme agréée, a private operator registered with the tax authority) in a structured format that software can read automatically, such as Factur-X, UBL or CII. Your company chooses a platform, receives supplier invoices there, issues its own invoices from there, and the platform transmits transaction and payment data to the administration. That transmission is called e-reporting. It covers transactions the other party does not report itself, typically sales to private individuals and sales abroad, so that the administration sees the full picture even outside domestic business-to-business flows. A foreign director can manage all of this remotely, but the mandate given to the platform, the person authorised to validate invoices, and the internal control trail must be documented, because the authenticity of origin, the integrity of content and the readability of each invoice must be guaranteed from issue until the end of the retention period.

Three practical questions come back in every foreign-owned company. First, language. Your invoices may be drafted in English for an international clientele, and article 289 answers directly: “Lorsqu’elle est rédigée dans une langue étrangère, le service des impôts peut, à des fins de contrôle, exiger une traduction en français, dans les conditions prévues au deuxième alinéa de l’article 54.” Keep a French version or the ability to produce a translation quickly, because a tax audit (contrôle fiscal) conducted while you are abroad always ends with a request for documents in French. Second, currency. You may bill in dollars, pounds or dirhams, and the code allows it: “Les montants figurant sur la facture peuvent être exprimés dans toute monnaie, pour autant que le montant de taxe à payer ou à régulariser soit déterminé en euros en utilisant le mécanisme de conversion prévu au 1 bis de l’article 266.” The VAT amount itself must always be computable in euros. Third, cross-border supplies. When a supplier established outside France provides goods or services to your French company, French VAT is frequently handled through the reverse charge (autoliquidation), and the code states the principle that “La taxe sur la valeur ajoutée doit être acquittée par les personnes qui réalisent les opérations imposables”, subject to the cases where the French customer accounts for the tax itself because the supplier has no French establishment. Your platform and your accountant must tag these flows correctly, because an invoice that omits the reverse-charge wording or shows foreign VAT instead of the French mechanism exposes you to a VAT reassessment (redressement) that is painful to challenge from another continent.

One more trap concerns the address shown on the invoice. Foreign groups often display the parent company’s foreign address on documents issued by the French subsidiary, or route all mail to the shareholder’s home abroad. The invoice must identify the actual French supplier with its French registered office (siège social), its SIREN number (the unique nine-digit identification number of a French business, issued by INSEE, the national statistics institute) and its intra-Community VAT number. If the registered office moves, for example from a domiciliation address to real premises in Paris or the Paris region, the transfer must be filed with the company registry and a new Kbis obtained before the new address spreads across hundreds of invoices. Our guide to transferring the registered office of a French company from abroad walks through that filing. Consistency between the Kbis, the VAT number, the platform directory and every invoice header is what makes your invoices payable without discussion and deductible without challenge.

To find your exact position in the calendar, the tax authority offers an online simulator that asks four questions about your company: its size measured on the last financial year closed before 1 January 2025, the type of customers served in France and abroad, the nature of the activity, and the VAT regime shown in the professional account on the tax website. Answering those four questions takes two minutes and tells a foreign director whether the company only receives for now or must already issue and transmit payment data. Run that simulator before choosing the platform, because the answer determines the subscription tier, the e-reporting settings and the training your bookkeeper needs.

II. Every Invoice You Issue or Chase Follows Strict French Rules on Content, Payment Time and Penalties

A. What each invoice must state and what a missing or false invoice costs

French commercial law imposes invoicing as a general duty, not a courtesy. Article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code provides that “Tout achat de produits ou toute prestation de service pour une activité professionnelle fait l’objet d’une facturation.” The seller must issue the invoice upon delivery or performance, and the buyer is not passive: “L’acheteur est tenu de la réclamer.” For a foreign-run company this cuts both ways. You must issue invoices for everything you sell to professionals in France, and you must claim the invoices of your French suppliers, because without them you cannot deduct VAT and you cannot prove your costs. A company that tolerates approximate billing from its providers, cash deals without invoices, or supplier invoices made out to the foreign parent instead of the French subsidiary builds its losses itself.

The mandatory contents are fixed by the code and its implementing decrees: names and addresses of the parties, date of sale or service, quantity, precise description, unit price excluding VAT, applicable VAT rate and amount, price reductions, payment date, late-penalty rate, fixed recovery fee, order number where one exists, and for cross-border European flows the VAT numbers and the legal wording for exemptions or reverse charge. Your general terms of sale (conditions générales de vente, the CGV) feed directly into the invoice, since the code defines that “Les conditions générales de vente comprennent notamment les conditions de règlement, ainsi que les éléments de détermination du prix tels que le barème des prix unitaires et les éventuelles réductions de prix.” Align the CGV, the order confirmation and the invoice before the first dispute, not after. When the three documents tell the same story about price, deadlines and penalties, the debtor has nowhere to hide.

Sanctions are severe and they strike both the missing invoice and the invented one. On the commercial side, article L. 441-9 provides that “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.” A legal person means your company, so the 375,000 euro ceiling applies to it, and the text continues: “Le maximum de l’amende encourue est porté à 150 000 € pour une personne physique et 750 000 € pour une personne morale en cas de réitération du manquement dans un délai de deux ans à compter de la date à laquelle la première décision de sanction est devenue définitive.” These administrative fines are imposed by the DGCCRF (Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes, the competition and consumer protection authority), which audits invoicing compliance independently of any tax audit. On the tax side, article 1737 of the General Tax Code punishes fictitious and missing invoices with a fine of 50 percent of the amount, and provides that “De la transaction, le fait de ne pas délivrer une facture ou la note prévue à l’article 290 quinquies et de ne pas comptabiliser la transaction.” triggers the penalty, while “Toutefois, lorsque la transaction a été comptabilisée, l’amende est réduite à 5 % et ne peut excéder 37 500 € par exercice”. The lesson for a company run from abroad is blunt: every real transaction gets a real invoice and an accounting entry. Anything else multiplies the fine base instead of saving tax.

B. How late payment pays you back: capped deadlines, ECB rate plus ten points, and court proof

French law caps payment periods in a way that surprises many foreign founders used to ninety-day terms. Article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code provides that “Le délai convenu entre les parties pour régler les sommes dues ne peut dépasser soixante jours après la date d’émission de la facture.” Sixty days from the invoice date is the default ceiling between professionals, with a possible extension to forty-five days end of month where the contract expressly provides for it. Any clause granting longer terms is unenforceable, and a foreign shareholder who signs a French customer’s purchasing conditions without reading them sometimes discovers that the customer imposed seventy-five or ninety days that no court will enforce. Put the compliant deadline on every invoice and in the CGV, because the deadline printed on the invoice sets the starting point for everything that follows.

Once the deadline passes, the money works for you without any reminder. The code states that “Les pénalités de retard sont exigibles sans qu’un rappel soit nécessaire.” Late penalties accrue automatically from the day after the due date, at the rate shown on the invoice, which cannot be lower than three times the legal interest rate and defaults to the ECB refinancing rate plus ten percentage points. The code adds that “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.” The implementing decree fixes that amount plainly: “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 unpaid invoice, due automatically, on top of the penalties, before any legal costs. For a company chasing ten unpaid invoices from abroad, that is 400 euros of statutory recovery fees added to principal and interest by operation of law, simply because the invoices stated the rate and the fee.

Courts apply these texts faithfully, and two recent judgments show how a diligent creditor wins even at a distance. In a July 2026 case before the Paris business court, a Hong Kong supplier sued its French customer for delivered orders, and the court recorded that “Elle sollicite le paiement des intérêts de retard et indemnités de recouvrement au visa des articles L 441-10-II du code de commerce.” The tribunal granted the claim in full: “Constate l’existence de la créance de la société LEACH & GARNER sur la société SCHMITTGALL et en chiffre le montant de 26.233,45 euros, augmentée d’un intérêt de retard au taux de la BCE majoré de 10 points à compter de la date d’échéance des factures et jusqu’à la date de la procédure de redressement judicaire de SCHMITTGALL d’un montant de 7 363,40 euros au titre des intérêts de retard, soit la somme totale de 33.586,85 euros.” A foreign company, pleading through counsel, recovered principal plus more than seven thousand euros of late interest computed at the ECB rate plus ten points. In a March 2026 judgment, the Annecy commercial court ordered a defaulting customer to pay “la somme de 15 050 euros TTC en principal, outre intérêts calculés aux taux d’intérêt appliqués par la BCE pour ses opérations de refinancement majoré de 10 points de pourcentage à compter du 6 août 2024 jusqu’à parfait paiement” and added “la somme de 80 euros au titre de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement” for two unpaid invoices. These decisions confirm the method: compliant invoices, a stated rate, counsel on the ground, and the court does the arithmetic.

The electronic invoice strengthens this entire chain. A structured invoice travelling through an accredited platform carries timestamps at each stage: issue, deposit, reception, acceptance or refusal. When the debtor claims it never received the invoice, the platform log answers. When the debtor disputes the due date, the structured data answers. The fastest recovery route remains the order to pay (injonction de payer, a simplified procedure where the court president orders payment on the basis of the invoices without a full hearing), and our step-by-step guide to collecting an unpaid French invoice from abroad details that procedure, including opposition risks and enforcement. Issuing compliant electronic invoices from day one means that if payment fails, the file handed to counsel is already complete: contract, order, delivery proof, structured invoice, platform timestamps, penalty computation. Distance stops mattering once the paper trail is perfect.

Conclusion

Electronic invoicing is now the operating system of business-to-business trade in France. Your company must receive electronic invoices since 1 September 2026 through an accredited platform, it must issue them at the latest by 1 September 2027 if it is small and immediately if it reaches mid-size scale, and every invoice must satisfy the strict French rules on content, capped payment periods and automatic late penalties. The reform rewards organised creditors: timestamped structured invoices, correct VAT treatment including reverse charge, consistent company details matching the Kbis, and penalty clauses that courts enforce to the euro. Set up the platform, align the CGV with the invoices, claim every supplier invoice, and chase every late payment with the ECB rate plus ten points and the forty-euro fee. Run that way, a French company managed from abroad collects faster and safer than many companies whose owners live next door.