You formed a company in France, you live in London, New York or Dubai, and your French accountant has just written to you about facturation électronique: from 1 September 2026 your French company must be able to receive electronic invoices, and depending on its size it must also issue them through an approved platform. You do not read French tax bulletins, you sign papers from abroad, and you wonder whether this reform really concerns a small société par actions simplifiée (SAS, the flexible French limited company most foreign founders choose) whose director lives outside France. It does. The obligation to receive electronic invoices applies to every company established in France from 1 September 2026, including small and medium-sized companies and micro-companies; only the obligation to issue is staggered, with large companies and mid-sized companies starting on 1 September 2026 and SMEs and micro-companies on 1 September 2027. Behind the technical vocabulary, the stakes are familiar to any business owner: your invoices must carry new mandatory mentions such as the customer SIREN number (the nine-digit identification number of every French business, issued by INSEE), they must travel through a registered platform, the data must reach the tax administration (the Direction générale des Finances publiques, DGFiP), and mistakes expose you to tax fines, commercial penalties and unpaid bills that are harder to collect. This guide explains, entirely in English and for a director living abroad, what the reform changes, how to comply from another country, and how to react when an invoice is wrong, late, rejected or unpaid.

I. Your French company must now send and receive electronic invoices: what changes on 1 September 2026 and what you must do from abroad

A. Who must issue, who must receive, and on which dates: large companies, mid-sized companies, SMEs and your French subsidiary

French value added tax law starts from a simple principle: every taxable person must make sure that an invoice is issued for each supply of goods or service made to another taxable person. Article 289 of the French General Tax Code states that an invoice must be issued for supplies of goods and services performed for another taxable person or for a non-taxable legal person, where the transaction is not exempt, and that the invoice must in principle be issued when the supply takes place. Your French SAS or société à responsabilité limitée (SARL, the more rigid French private limited company) is therefore already inside the invoicing system, even before the digital reform. What the reform adds is the channel: these invoices must now be issued, transmitted and received in electronic form through registered systems, and the corresponding transaction data must be sent to the administration. The official business portal of the French administration confirms the timetable in plain terms: the obligation to issue electronic invoices takes effect on 1 September 2026 for large companies and mid-sized companies and on 1 September 2027 for SMEs and micro-companies, while the obligation to receive electronic invoices applies to all companies from 1 September 2026. That last sentence matters most to foreign founders: even if your French company is small and only starts issuing in 2027, it must be able to receive electronic invoices from 1 September 2026, which means choosing a platform now, not next year.

Practically, the first question is whether your company is concerned at all. The reform covers transactions between companies established in France that are subject to VAT: supplies of goods or services located in France between two taxable persons, related advance payments, and sales at public auction of second-hand goods, works of art, collectors’ items or antiques. If your French company bills French clients that are businesses, it is inside the scope. If it only bills private individuals or only bills clients outside France, the core e-invoicing obligation does not apply to those flows, but a second obligation may still apply: e-reporting, which is the electronic transmission to the administration of data on transactions that fall outside e-invoicing, such as sales to private consumers or cross-border sales. Article 290 of the General Tax Code requires taxable persons established in France to communicate to the administration, in electronic form, the data on these transactions where they are not exempt. Your accountant will therefore map three categories for you: domestic business-to-business flows that go through e-invoicing, other flows that go through e-reporting, and exempt transactions. Ask for that map in writing before you sign any platform contract, because many disputes come from companies that bought software covering only one of the two obligations.

The second question is who does what when the director lives abroad. Nothing in the reform requires the director to be physically in France to comply: the company designates its platform, registers in the national directory, and authorises its accountant or an employee to operate the flows. But do not confuse technical delegation with legal responsibility. Under Article 286 of the General Tax Code, every person liable for VAT must declare the start of its activity within fifteen days, provide information about its professional activity, and keep the books and documents the administration may ask for. If your company was registered through the guichet unique (the single online business registration portal run by the INPI, the French intellectual property and business institute) and received its Kbis (the official identity card of a French company, issued by the greffe, the clerk’s office of the commercial court), those identification details feed the invoicing directory. Check that the company name, SIREN number, address and legal representative shown in the directory match the Kbis exactly: a mismatch is the most common reason invoices get rejected by the recipient’s platform, and the rejection looks like a technical error when it is really an identity error. If you changed director, moved the registered office (siège social) or altered the company name without updating the registration, fix the registration first, then the invoicing parameters. Our general guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, from bank account and Kbis to VAT and first hire, explains how these building blocks fit together.

B. How an invoice travels in France now: approved platform, public portal, directory and accepted formats

Under the reform, an invoice no longer travels simply from your mailbox to your client’s mailbox. It passes through a supervised circuit with three actors you must be able to name in English and in French. The plateforme agréée, usually called a Partner Dematerialisation Platform (PDP), is a private platform registered by the tax administration that issues, transmits and receives electronic invoices and sends the required data to the administration. The Portail public de facturation (PPF), the public invoicing portal, is the State-operated backbone that concentrates the national directory of companies, receives the data transmitted by the platforms, and offers a basic entry-level service for small volumes. The annuaire, the national directory, is the routing table: it tells the sender’s platform where to deliver each invoice based on the recipient’s SIREN number. The administration’s business portal states the rule plainly: from September 2026 companies must submit their invoices through a government-approved platform, directly or through a compliant solution, and each company must designate its platform to issue and receive its electronic invoices or declare its data, with the official list of registered platforms published online. For a director living abroad, the practical consequence is a short decision list: choose a registered PDP (or the entry-level offer of the public portal if your volumes are tiny), designate it as your company’s platform, verify that your company appears correctly in the directory, and make sure your accountant has access rights.

Two technical points deserve your attention because they cause most cross-border friction. First, the format. France accepts a small number of structured formats, principally Factur-X (a hybrid PDF with embedded structured data, the easiest route for small companies), UBL and CII (pure structured formats used by larger companies and accounting systems). A simple PDF attached to an email is not an electronic invoice within the meaning of the reform: it lacks the structured data the platform must validate and transmit. If your foreign parent company sends you classic PDFs from its own ERP system, those documents will not flow into your French company’s reception channel; you will have to ask the supplier to send compliant invoices or to route them through a compatible platform. Second, consent and routing. Under the current wording of Article 289 of the General Tax Code, electronic invoices in the broad sense are issued and received in electronic form and their transmission and provision are subject to the acceptance of the recipient. Under the reform, that acceptance logic is replaced for domestic business-to-business flows by an obligation: you cannot refuse the principle of electronic reception, you can only dispute the content of a specific invoice. Make sure your contracts with French suppliers and clients state the platform addresses, the SIREN numbers and the contact person for invoice disputes, so that a rejected invoice does not silently become an unpaid invoice.

Currency, language and archiving complete the picture. Article 289 of the General Tax Code allows invoice amounts to be expressed in any currency, provided the VAT amount is stated in euros using the official conversion mechanism, and it allows invoices drafted in a foreign language while reserving the right of the tax authorities to require a French translation for control purposes. Keep your invoices bilingual where possible: English for your own understanding, French for the administration and the commercial courts. As for keeping records, French commercial law is strict: Article L123-22 of the Commercial Code provides that accounting documents must be drawn up in euros and in French and that accounting documents and supporting papers must be kept for ten years. Your platform stores the invoices, but the ten-year responsibility stays with the company, not with the software vendor. Before you commit, ask the platform for its archiving certificate, the exit procedure if you change provider, and the format in which you recover your archive. A founder who discovers during a tax audit that three years of invoices sit in a proprietary format on a terminated contract learns an expensive lesson about the difference between storage and legal archiving.

II. Your French invoices are wrong, late or rejected and you live abroad: penalties, proof and how to fix and fight back

A. Wrong or missing mandatory mentions, late payment and fines: customer SIREN, delivery address, VAT on debits, forty-euro fee and tax penalties

French invoices must contain a long list of mandatory mentions, and the e-invoicing reform adds four new ones. Every purchase of products or service for a professional activity must be invoiced, the seller must deliver the invoice when the supply occurs, the buyer must claim it, and each side keeps a copy: that is the rule of Article L441-9 of the Commercial Code. The classic mentions include the date and number of the invoice, the identity of both parties with their registration numbers, the VAT numbers, the precise description and quantity of goods or services, the unit price, the VAT rate and amount, and the payment deadline. On top of these, the administration announces four new mentions for the reform: the SIREN number of the customer, the delivery address of the goods where it differs from the billing address, a statement of whether the invoiced transactions consist exclusively of supplies of goods or of services or of both categories, and the mention that VAT is paid on debits (TVA sur les débits) where the supplier has chosen that option. The calendar for these new mentions follows the issuing calendar: September 2026 for large and mid-sized companies, September 2027 for SMEs and micro-companies. Concretely, if your French company is an SME that only starts issuing electronic invoices in 2027, it should still prepare its customer files now: collecting the SIREN number of every French business client, distinguishing delivery addresses from billing addresses, and deciding with the accountant whether the VAT-on-debits option makes sense. Invoices rejected in 2026 are very often invoices whose customer file is incomplete, and each rejection restarts the payment clock.

Payment deadlines and late-payment sanctions are where foreign founders lose the most money, because French law is stricter than the practice in many Anglo-Saxon contracts. Unless otherwise agreed, the payment period cannot exceed thirty days after receipt of the goods or performance of the service; the period agreed between the parties cannot exceed sixty days from the invoice date, with a possible derogation to forty-five days end of month. That is the rule of Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code. Above all, the settlement conditions must state the conditions of application and the interest rate for late-payment penalties due on the day after the payment date shown on the invoice, plus the amount of the fixed recovery fee due when sums are paid after that date. The Cour de cassation, the highest French court for civil and commercial matters, restates this requirement word for word: “les conditions de règlement doivent obligatoirement préciser les conditions d’application et le taux d’intérêt des pénalités de retard exigibles le jour suivant la date de règlement figurant sur la facture ainsi que le montant de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement due au créancier dans le cas où les sommes dues sont réglées après cette date” (Commercial chamber, 24 April 2024, appeal no. 22-24.275, official decision). Unless otherwise stipulated, and never below three times the legal interest rate, the rate equals the rate applied by the European Central Bank to its most recent refinancing operation plus ten percentage points, and the court adds the decisive sentence: “Les pénalités de retard sont exigibles sans qu’un rappel soit nécessaire” (late-payment penalties are due without any reminder being necessary). In other words, your French company does not need to send a reminder to earn penalties; it needs a compliant invoice that states the rate.

The same court treats these protections as public policy. In a 21 October 2020 ruling the Commercial chamber approved the reasoning that “doit donc être réputée non écrite, la clause prévoyant que les factures impayées à leur échéance ne produiront intérêt qu’à compter de la mise en demeure de payer adressée par le créancier au débiteur” (a clause providing that invoices unpaid at due date will only bear interest from the formal demand sent by the creditor to the debtor must be deemed unwritten), for breach of the former Article L441-6 of the Commercial Code (Commercial chamber, 21 October 2020, appeal no. 18-25.749, official decision). For you, the lesson is direct: never accept a French client’s general conditions that make late interest conditional on a formal demand, and never sign your own conditions without the penalty clause and the fixed forty-euro recovery fee. On the tax side, the sanction for false or missing invoices is severe: Article 1737 of the General Tax Code punishes with a fine equal to 50 percent of the amount, among other cases, the act of disguising or concealing the identity or address of suppliers or clients and the act of issuing an invoice that does not correspond to a real transaction or that states an identity or address that is inaccurate. A parallel provision punishes, per missing mention or inaccuracy, failures to comply with the invoicing rules of Articles 289 and 289 B and their implementing texts. During the first months of the reform, the administration has announced support and a helpline, but the legal basis for fines is already in force: treat every SIREN field, every address field and every VAT line as a potential penalty, not as paperwork.

B. Prove, collect and contest from abroad: keeping records for ten years, suing for unpaid invoices, and answering a tax or VAT challenge

When a French client does not pay, the director living abroad has three battles at once: proving the debt, choosing the right court procedure, and keeping the company compliant while the dispute lasts. Proof starts with the invoice itself, but it does not end there. The invoice must be authentic in origin, intact in content and readable from issue until the end of the retention period, and the company must be able to show, through documented and permanent controls, a reliable audit trail between the invoice and the underlying supply. That audit trail is your delivery slips, signed timesheets for services, order confirmations, email acceptances and platform transmission receipts. Store them with the invoice, in the same archive, for the full ten-year period required by Article L123-22 of the Commercial Code. A founder who keeps invoices but deletes the platform logs, the contracts and the proof of delivery will discover in court that the invoice alone does not always win: the debtor claims the goods never arrived or the service was never performed, and the judge asks for the trail. Conversely, a complete file allows fast procedures. For an undisputed invoice, the injonction de payer (the French order-for-payment procedure before the commercial court or the judicial court) lets you obtain an enforceable order without a full hearing, which your lawyer can then serve through a commissaire de justice (the French enforcement officer, formerly called huissier). For urgent cases, the référé-provision (summary proceedings for an advance payment) can grant a provisional sum where the debt is not seriously disputable, as illustrated by the 2024 litigation over unpaid training invoices decided by the Versailles Court of Appeal and reviewed by the Cour de cassation (Commercial chamber, 24 April 2024, appeal no. 22-24.275, official decision). All of this can be instructed from abroad: powers of attorney, exhibits and procedural documents travel electronically, and only specific hearings may require physical representation, which your lawyer handles.

VAT disputes follow a different track and demand a different reflex. The person liable for VAT on a taxable transaction is, as a starting point, the person who carries it out, subject to reverse-charge cases where the customer accounts for the tax: that is the principle of Article 283 of the General Tax Code. If the administration challenges your e-reporting data, rejects your VAT deduction for want of a compliant invoice, or reassesses you because invoices were issued outside the approved circuit, do not answer with commercial arguments; answer with the platform evidence. Produce the transmission receipts, the directory entries, the format validation reports and the contracts showing who was responsible for issuing. File the administrative claim (réclamation contentieuse) within the deadline stated on the tax notice, pay what is undeniably due where that protects you from further penalties, and contest the rest with documents, not with explanations about living abroad. Where the dispute concerns the identity of the person liable or the place of the transaction, the wording of Article 290 of the General Tax Code on data communication and of Article 286 of the General Tax Code on VAT obligations will frame your defence. And keep the commercial and tax files separate in your mind: winning the commercial case against your client does not automatically cancel a tax fine for defective invoices, and obtaining cancellation of a tax fine does not automatically make your client pay. Run both tracks in parallel from day one.

Conclusion

France’s electronic invoicing reform does not create a new tax, but it creates a new railway: from 1 September 2026 every company established in France must receive electronic invoices, large and mid-sized companies must also issue them, and SMEs and micro-companies join the issuing side on 1 September 2027, with transaction data flowing to the DGFiP through registered platforms and the public portal. For a founder living abroad, compliance is a short list executed rigorously: confirm the company’s size category and the applicable date, designate a registered platform, clean the customer and supplier files including SIREN numbers and delivery addresses, insert the four new mentions into the invoice templates, train the accountant on the e-invoicing versus e-reporting split, and archive invoices with their audit trail for ten years. Then protect the revenue the invoices represent: compliant settlement conditions with a penalty rate and the fixed recovery fee, systematic reminders that cost nothing because penalties run without reminder, and fast court action when a debtor stalls. The companies that suffer under the reform will not be the smallest or the most foreign; they will be the ones whose invoices carry the wrong SIREN, travel outside the approved circuit, or state no penalty rate. Put your company on the right track now, and the reform becomes what it promises: faster payment, cleaner VAT, and proof that holds up in court.

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