You live in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, and your French company — often an SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible joint-stock company foreigners favour) or an SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company) — has just entered a new era without asking your permission. Since 1 September 2026, France requires electronic invoicing between VAT-registered businesses, and your company must comply even though you run it from abroad. Every French business, whatever its size, must now be able to receive electronic invoices, while large companies and mid-sized companies must also issue them in electronic form. If your company is a small or medium-sized business, the duty to issue follows on 1 September 2027. A scanned paper invoice, an ordinary PDF attached to an email, or a document sent by simple message no longer counts. Invoices must travel through an approved platform, carry four new mandatory details, and feed the tax administration with transaction data. Miss the switch and you face defective invoices, VAT deductions at risk, fines, and suppliers who cannot pay you because your invoice never arrived in the right format. This article explains, for a founder who lives outside France, what the reform requires, which deadlines apply to your company, how to choose a platform and send a compliant invoice from abroad, and how to fix things when an invoice, a deadline or a platform goes wrong.

I. What France Now Requires From Your Company, Even If You Live Abroad

A. Which Invoices Must Go Electronic, and by When?

The starting point is the scope of the duty. Article 289 bis of the CGI (Code général des impôts, the French Tax Code) provides that « l’émission, la transmission et la réception des factures relatives aux opérations mentionnées aux a et d du 1 du I dudit article 289 ainsi qu’aux acomptes s’y rapportant s’opèrent sous une forme électronique, selon des normes de facturation électronique définies par arrêté du ministre chargé du budget, lorsque l’émetteur de la facture et son destinataire sont des assujettis qui sont établis ou ont leur domicile ou leur résidence habituelle en France ». In plain English: where both the supplier and the customer are VAT-registered persons (assujettis, meaning persons liable for VAT) established, domiciled or habitually resident in France, domestic business-to-business invoices and related deposits must be issued, transmitted and received electronically. Your French subsidiary or company meets that test even if you, the shareholder or director, live on another continent, because the test looks at where the company is established, not where you sleep.

The same article adds the channel through which everything must pass: « L’émission, la transmission et la réception des factures électroniques s’effectuent en recourant à une plateforme agréée ». A plateforme agréée, usually shortened to PA and translated as approved platform, is a private invoicing platform registered with the tax administration. You may connect to it directly or through compatible business software, but the invoice must transit through it. The State also maintains a central directory for routing: « l’Etat met un annuaire central à la disposition des plateformes agréées ». That directory, called the annuaire, tells your platform where to deliver each customer invoice. If your company has not designated its platform, its invoices have no address to go to, and its suppliers’ invoices have nowhere to arrive from.

The calendar is staggered by company size, and the dates are now in force. From 1 September 2026, every company, whatever its size, must be able to receive electronic invoices, while large companies and entreprises de taille intermédiaire (ETI, mid-sized companies) must also issue all their invoices electronically and transmit their transaction and payment data to the administration, a second duty known as e-reporting. From 1 September 2027, small and medium-sized companies and micro-businesses must in turn issue electronically and transmit their e-reporting data. The reform covers all VAT-registered businesses, including the self-employed and the liberal professions, so a one-person SASU (société par actions simplifiée unipersonnelle, a one-shareholder SAS) selling consulting to French corporate clients is inside the perimeter. Operations with private individuals, certain associations and foreign customers fall outside e-invoicing itself but feed the parallel e-reporting duty, which consists of transmitting transaction and payment data electronically to the tax administration. If you deliver goods to VAT-registered customers in another European Union Member State, remember the older recapitulative statement duty of article 289 B of the CGI: « Tout assujetti identifié à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée doit déposer, dans un délai et selon des modalités fixés par décret, un état récapitulatif des clients, avec leur numéro d’identification à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée, auxquels il a livré des biens dans les conditions prévues au I de l’article 262 ter ». E-invoicing does not remove that statement; the two duties sit side by side.

The content of the invoice changes too. Four new mandatory details must appear on invoices from 1 September 2026: the customer’s Siren number (the Siren is the nine-digit identifier issued to every business in the Sirene register), a statement of the operation category (sale of goods, supply of services, or both), where relevant the mention that the supplier has opted to pay VAT on debits rather than on cash received, and the full delivery address of the goods where it differs from the customer’s address. Check your templates now, because most foreign-designed accounting software prints none of these. A French customer whose accounts department receives an invoice without its Siren number will send it back, and the payment clock only starts on a compliant invoice. Practical consequence for a founder abroad: ask your French accountant (expert-comptable) for a model invoice in Factur-X or one of the other structured formats accepted by the platforms, test it with your platform before September volumes hit, and confirm that every regular customer appears correctly in the directory. Companies that waited for the last week discovered mismatched directory entries and spent days correcting routing data while invoices piled up.

None of this depends on your residence. The company is French, registered at the RCS (Registre du commerce et des sociétés, the trade and companies register kept by the greffe, the court registry), identified by its Siren and Siret numbers, and holding a Kbis (the official extract that proves the company’s legal existence, similar to a certificate of incorporation). Its invoices follow French law even when you approve them from a laptop in another time zone. If you chose your vehicle after reading our guide on how to choose between an SAS, an SARL, a branch or a subsidiary in France, note that the branch of a foreign company registered in France is equally concerned whenever it invoices French VAT-registered customers. And because invoicing and VAT registration walk together, founders who are still sorting out their French VAT number should read our companion guide on VAT registration, reverse charge, returns and penalties for foreign companies in France before their first invoice goes out.

B. Why Does One Defective Invoice Threaten Your VAT Deduction and Your Accounts?

An invoice is not stationery. It is the document that creates, proves and dates your VAT rights, and the reform makes its quality more visible, not less important. Article 289 of the CGI states the standing rule: « 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 ». You must ensure an invoice exists for your supplies to other VAT-registered persons. Electronic transmission changes the envelope, never the duty to issue a complete and accurate invoice.

The reason founders should care is VAT deduction. Article 271 of the CGI provides that « La taxe sur la valeur ajoutée qui a grevé les éléments du prix d’une opération imposable est déductible de la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée applicable à cette opération », that « Le droit à déduction prend naissance lorsque la taxe déductible devient exigible chez le redevable », and that « La déduction de la taxe ayant grevé les biens et les services est opérée par imputation sur la taxe due par le redevable au titre du mois pendant lequel le droit à déduction a pris naissance ». Deduction belongs to a specific month, and the invoice is what proves the month. A missing, late or defective invoice therefore does not merely irritate your accountant; it postpones or destroys thousands of euros of deductible VAT. Article 269 of the CGI fixes the chargeable event: « Le fait générateur de la taxe se produit » « Au moment où la livraison, l’acquisition intracommunautaire du bien ou la prestation de services est effectué ». Your returns must follow that timing, and article 287 of the CGI requires every VAT taxable person to file accordingly: « 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 ». Electronic invoices feed these returns with structured data, which means the administration will compare your declared figures with the data your platform transmitted. Consistency between the two becomes the first thing a tax inspector checks.

Two recent rulings of the Cour de cassation (the French supreme court for civil and criminal matters) show how unforgiving invoice and VAT procedure can be, and both deserve the attention of a director living abroad. On 1 October 2025, the Commercial, Financial and Economic Chamber, in appeal number 24-14.456 (Cour de cassation, chambre commerciale, 1er octobre 2025, pourvoi n° 24-14.456), dealt with a liquidator who had asked the tax administration for a VAT credit refund based on invoices received between October 2000 and July 2003 and paid by the judicial liquidator during 2012. The facts record that un remboursement de crédit de taxe sur la valeur ajoutée (TVA) pour le compte de la société NFDB afférent à des factures reçues entre octobre 2000 et juillet 2003 et payées par le liquidateur judiciaire au cours de l’année 2012. La demande a été déclarée irrecevable par l’administration fiscale pour cause de prescription. The Court ended the Paris appeal with the words CASSE ET ANNULE, en toutes ses dispositions, l’arrêt rendu le 27 février 2024, entre les parties, par la cour d’appel de Paris. The lesson for your company is direct: VAT rights expire, late paperwork dies on time limits, and an electronic invoicing system that timestamps, archives and retrieves every invoice is your best defence against a prescription argument. Paper boxes in a Paris storage room, managed by nobody because the founder lives abroad, are how rights get lost.

On 22 October 2025, the same Chamber, in appeal number 24-19.201 (Cour de cassation, chambre commerciale, 22 octobre 2025, pourvoi n° 24-19.201), decided a factoring dispute with a holding every founder who outsources billing should read. The Court recalled that la subrogation conventionnelle s’opère à l’initiative du créancier lorsque celui-ci, recevant son paiement d’une tierce personne, la subroge dans ses droits contre le débiteur, that le fait générateur de la TVA se produit au moment où la livraison, l’acquisition intracommunautaire du bien ou la prestation de services est effectuée, and that paying an invoice including VAT subrogates the payer into the creditor’s rights but il n’a pas pour effet de le rendre redevable à l’égard de l’Etat du paiement de cette taxe. Translated into business language: handing your receivables, your invoicing or your collections to a factor, a platform or a service provider does not transfer your VAT obligations to them. Your contracts with platforms, factors and accountants must say clearly who declares what, who keeps which proof, and who pays if data never reaches the administration. From abroad, you will sign these contracts at a distance; read the VAT clauses twice.

Cross-border founders face two extra traps. First, reverse charge. Where a supply covered by article 259 A of the CGI is made by a supplier established outside France, « la taxe est acquittée par l’acquéreur, le destinataire ou le preneur qui agit en tant qu’assujetti et qui dispose d’un numéro d’identification à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée en France ». Your French company, as the French VAT-registered customer of your foreign parent or supplier, self-assesses that VAT. Your e-reporting data and your VAT return must both reflect it, or the comparison will flag you. Second, fiscal representation. A person not established in the European Union who owes French VAT or must complete French declaration formalities « est tenue de faire accréditer auprès du service des impôts un représentant assujetti établi en France qui s’engage à remplir les formalités incombant à cette personne et, en cas d’opérations imposables, à acquitter la taxe à sa place ». If your group structure includes a non-EU entity trading in France without a French establishment, appoint that représentant fiscal (accredited tax representative) before the invoicing chain starts, not after the first control letter arrives.

Finally, accounting law surrounds every invoice with duties no platform performs for you. Article L123-22 of the Code de commerce (the French Commercial Code) states that « Les documents comptables sont établis en euros et en langue française » and that « Les documents comptables et les pièces justificatives sont conservés pendant dix ans ». Electronic invoices are pièces justificatives (supporting documents): keep them, in euros and in French, for ten years, in a form the administration can audit. A platform subscription that deletes data after two years, or an English-only archive with no French invoice image, breaches that duty. Confirm retention, export formats and audit access in writing with your provider.

II. How to Get Compliant From Abroad Without Flying to France

A. How Do You Choose an Approved Platform and Send Your First Compliant Invoice From Abroad?

Start with the choice of channel. You need either a plateforme agréée itself or a solution compatible, meaning business software connected to an approved platform that sends and receives through it. The administration publishes the list of registered platforms on the impots.gouv.fr website (the official portal of the French tax administration), and the official guidance pages of the Ministry of the Economy and of impots.gouv.fr describe the calendar, the directory and the practical questions company by company. For a small foreign-held company, the realistic options are your accountant’s platform, your billing software provider’s connected offer, or a standalone approved platform. Compare them on five points: registration on the official list, directory connection for your Siren number, support for your invoice formats and the four new mandatory details, e-reporting transmission for your customer mix, and ten-year archiving with export on demand. Price matters less than coverage: a cheap tool that cannot transmit your e-reporting or archive for ten years is the most expensive choice you can make.

Then designate and register. Each company must designate its platform for issuing and receiving electronic invoices and for declaring its data. In practice your accountant or your platform drives the registration, the directory entry is created from your Siren data, and you test routing with one real customer before switching everything over. Run the test early: directory mismatches, wrong Siren numbers and unregistered customers are the three failures every advisor saw in September 2026. From abroad, organise a video session with your accountant, share screens, send two test invoices to a friendly French customer, confirm receipt in its platform, then migrate customer by customer, keeping your old invoicing running in parallel for two weeks. Keep written proof of every step: platform contract, designation confirmation, directory registration evidence, test receipts. If a dispute later arises about when an invoice was sent or received, platforms log timestamps that courts understand far better than an email thread.

Update the invoice itself. Add the customer Siren, the operation category, the VAT-on-debits option where your company elected it, and the delivery address where it differs. Verify the VAT calculation line by line, especially where reverse charge applies because the supplier sits outside France, and mirror every invoice in the VAT return for the month of the chargeable event. Your accountant should reconcile platform data against returns monthly; ask for that reconciliation report expressly, since distance makes silent drift more likely. The administration announced an approach of tolerance and benevolence toward companies facing difficulties at the 1 September launch, but tolerance is not an exemption: it rewards companies that chose a platform, started the migration and can show their work, not companies that waited. Document your good faith from day one.

Paris and Ile-de-France founders should add three local reflexes. First, invoice disputes in the capital go to the economic court, now called the tribunal des activités économiques de Paris, whose registry (greffe) runs the online filing portal at greffe-tae-paris.fr; a customer who rejects your electronic invoice as non-compliant will sue or be sued there, and the judge will start by asking through which platform the invoice travelled. Second, annual accounts of most companies must be filed at the greffe to be appended to the RCS, and article L232-21 of the Code de commerce allows electronic filing within an extended period: « ou dans les deux mois suivant cette approbation lorsque ce dépôt est effectué par voie électronique ». File from abroad electronically and within time; late filing plus defective invoicing is the combination that turns a routine control into a deeper audit. Third, Paris suppliers, from landlords to agencies, now ask routinely for your platform details and directory references before paying; keep a one-page note in French with your Siren, your platform name and your billing contact, and send it with every new contract. These details cost nothing and remove the most common payment excuse of autumn 2026.

B. What Fines Apply, and How Do You Fix a Missed Deadline or a Defective Invoice?

The penalty system for invoicing is older than the reform and hits harder than most founders expect. Article 1737 of the CGI provides that « Entraîne l’application d’une amende égale à 50 % du montant », among other cases, « 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 ». Failing to issue an invoice and failing to record the transaction draws a fine of half the transaction amount. The same article warns that « Le client professionnel est solidairement tenu au paiement de cette amende, qui ne peut excéder 375 000 € par exercice »: your French corporate customer is jointly liable for that fine, capped at 375,000 euros per financial year, which explains why customers now chase suppliers over invoice compliance. There is, however, a powerful incentive to keep proper books, because « lorsque la transaction a été comptabilisée, l’amende est réduite à 5 % et ne peut excéder 37 500 € par exercice ». Recording the transaction cuts the fine to five percent, capped at 37,500 euros per year. And smaller defects are punished per invoice: « Toute omission ou inexactitude constatée dans les factures ou documents en tenant lieu mentionnés aux articles 289 et 290 quinquies donne lieu à l’application d’une amende de 15 € ». Fifteen euros per omission or inaccuracy sounds small until a control multiplies it by four hundred invoices missing the customer Siren number.

Declarative failures carry their own fines. Article 1788 A of the CGI states that « Entraîne l’application d’une amende de 750 € : a. Le défaut de production dans les délais des états prévus à l’article 289 B », and that « L’amende est portée à 1 500 € à défaut de production de la déclaration dans les trente jours d’une mise en demeure ». Seven hundred and fifty euros for missing statements, rising to one thousand five hundred after an unanswered formal notice: founders who ignore French mail because they live abroad pay this fine regularly. Organise mail forwarding, empower your accountant to receive copies, and diary every deadline twice. The e-reporting flow will generate the same discipline through data comparison: figures your platform transmits and figures your returns declare must match, and gaps draw questions long before they draw fines.

If something already went wrong, work through a rescue sequence rather than hoping the file sleeps. First, map the damage: which invoices never went through a platform, which lack the new mandatory details, which customers never received them, and which returns already declared the corresponding VAT. Second, regularise the books immediately, because a recorded transaction divides the article 1737 fine by ten, as shown above. Third, reissue or complete the invoices through your approved platform now, with correct numbers, dates and details, and transmit the missing e-reporting data; late compliance beats persistent breach, and the timestamp trail proves your good faith. Fourth, reconcile platform data with VAT returns and file corrective returns where the declared figures are wrong, since article 287 ties you to returns matching the model prescribed by the administration. Fifth, answer every formal notice within its deadline, especially the thirty-day window that doubles the article 1788 A fine, and keep copies of everything for the ten-year retention period article L123-22 imposes. Sixth, if a customer refuses to pay a non-compliant invoice, do not rewrite history by backdating a corrected invoice; issue a proper corrective document through the platform and reference the original. Backdated or fictitious invoices attract the heaviest qualification, including the fifty percent fine for invoices not matching a real supply, and no distance excuses them.

Two evidentiary habits separate founders who survive controls from those who fund them. Keep the platform logs, the directory registration, the test receipts, the accountant’s monthly reconciliation and the corrective filings together in one file per year, accessible from abroad. And calendar the VAT time limits the Cour de cassation keeps enforcing: deduction rights and refund claims expire, as the 1 October 2025 ruling recalled when it let a prescription defence kill a VAT credit refund claimed years after the invoices. Electronic archiving with reliable dates turns that risk into routine. Your company may be small and your life may be elsewhere, but the file the inspector opens in Paris must look like someone was watching.

Conclusion

France’s electronic invoicing reform changes the plumbing of every domestic business-to-business sale, and your French company is inside it whether you live in Paris or on another continent. Since 1 September 2026 all companies must receive electronic invoices and large and mid-sized companies must issue them, with small and medium-sized companies following on 1 September 2027. Invoices and deposits between French VAT-registered businesses travel through an approved platform, carry the customer Siren number and three further new details, and feed e-reporting data to the administration. Around each invoice stand the permanent duties: issue a complete invoice, deduct VAT in the right month, self-assess reverse charge where the supplier is foreign, file matching returns, keep everything in French and in euros for ten years. Defective invoicing draws fines of up to half the transaction amount, shared with the professional customer, while recorded transactions, timely statements and answered notices divide penalties and preserve rights. Choose a registered platform, register in the directory, test with a real customer, reconcile platform data with returns every month, and regularise fast when something slips. Run from abroad with that discipline, and the reform becomes what it was designed to be: faster payment, cleaner VAT, and a company file that answers for itself.