On 1 September 2026, France entered the era of mandatory electronic invoicing between businesses. If you own a French company and live abroad, this reform concerns you directly: since that date, every company registered in France, whatever its size, must be able to receive invoices in electronic form, and large and mid-sized companies must also issue all their invoices electronically and transmit their transaction data to the tax administration. Small and medium-sized companies follow on 1 September 2027. Living in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore changes nothing: the obligation sits on the French company, identified by its SIREN number (the nine-digit identifier issued by the French statistics institute INSEE when the company is entered on the trade register), not on the place where its shareholder or director happens to live. A PDF attached to an email, which many foreign founders still use, no longer counts as an electronic invoice. This guide explains, in practical terms, what changed on 1 September 2026, what a compliant electronic invoice looks like, how to put your company in order from abroad, and what fines apply if you ignore the new rules. It builds on our general guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder and complements our analysis of VAT registration and penalties for foreign-owned French companies.

I. What the 1 September 2026 reform changes for your French company

A. Who must receive, who must issue, and by when: the calendar foreign owners keep missing

The legal basis of the reform is Ordinance No. 2021-1190 of 15 September 2021 on the generalisation of electronic invoicing in transactions between persons liable for value added tax (VAT) (Journal officiel of 16 September 2021), implemented by Decree No. 2022-1299 of 7 October 2022 on the generalisation of electronic invoicing (Journal officiel of 8 October 2022). These texts rewrote the invoicing rules of the French General Tax Code (Code général des impôts, abbreviated CGI). The key provision is now Article 289 bis of the CGI, which states 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: whenever the supplier and the customer are both VAT-registered businesses established in France, the invoice must be issued, transmitted and received electronically. The classic rule remains the starting point: Article 289 of the CGI 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”. Every VAT-registered business must make sure an invoice is issued for its supplies of goods and services to another business.

The French Ministry of the Economy states that the business e-invoicing reform entered into force on 1 September 2026, on its official information page Tout savoir sur la facturation électronique pour les entreprises. Concretely, the calendar has two milestones. On 1 September 2026, all companies, whatever their size, had to become able to receive electronic invoices, while large companies and intermediate-sized companies also had to issue all their invoices in electronic format and transmit their e-reporting data. On 1 September 2027, small and micro-enterprises must in turn become able to issue invoices electronically and to transmit their e-reporting data. In French business vocabulary, large companies (grandes entreprises) and intermediate-sized companies (entreprises de taille intermédiaire, abbreviated ETI) are defined by headcount, turnover and balance-sheet thresholds in the Labour Code and by the national statistics institute; small and medium-sized companies (petites et moyennes entreprises, abbreviated PME) and micro-enterprises sit below those thresholds. If your French subsidiary belongs to a foreign group, the size category is assessed undertaking by undertaking under French statistical rules, and belonging to a large international group can push the French entity into a higher category, so this point must be checked with your French accountant (expert-comptable) rather than assumed from the size of the French team alone.

Three frequent misunderstandings among foreign owners must be corrected at once. First, the reform applies to transactions between businesses established in France that are liable for VAT, and transactions covered by a VAT exemption stay outside electronic invoicing. If your French company only carries out VAT-exempt operations, the electronic format is not mandatory for those supplies, although the ordinary invoicing rules still apply. Second, public procurement follows its own channel: invoices to French public bodies continue to go through Chorus Pro, the State invoicing portal, under the public procurement code, and Article 289 bis itself reserves the application of Article L. 2392-1 of that code. Third, and most important for readers of this column, non-residence exempts nothing. The obligation attaches to the French company, which has its registered office (siège social) in France, is entered on the Trade and Companies Register (registre du commerce et des sociétés, abbreviated RCS, kept by the clerk of the commercial court known as the greffe) and holds a Kbis extract (the official identity card of a French company). The fact that the president (président) of your SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible company form most foreign founders choose) or the manager (gérant) of your SARL (société à responsabilité limitée) lives abroad, or that board decisions are signed from another country, does not suspend a single deadline.

B. What counts as an electronic invoice: approved platform, structured format and four new mandatory details

Many foreign founders believe they already comply because they send PDF invoices by email. The administration answers that this is wrong: a scanned paper invoice, an ordinary PDF or a document sent by email will no longer satisfy the rules. A compliant electronic invoice must satisfy three cumulative conditions: follow a standardised electronic format, carry the mandatory invoice details in dedicated fields of that format, and travel to the customer through an approved platform working with the administration. Each of these three points deserves attention from a director operating from abroad.

The standardised format means the invoice is not a picture of a document but structured data: identical tags carry identical information whatever the software reads them, so that the customer’s system, the platform and the tax administration all interpret each field the same way. France accepts the European standard formats used for this purpose, and your software provider or platform converts your invoice into the required syntax. The practical consequence is that you cannot improvise fields or keep your old Word template: the data must sit in dedicated fields, including the new ones described below.

The approved platform (plateforme agréée) is the cornerstone of the system. Article 289 bis (Article 289 bis of the CGI) is explicit: “L’émission, la transmission et la réception des factures électroniques s’effectuent en recourant à une plateforme agréée.” An approved platform is a private dematerialisation provider that has completed an registration procedure with the tax administration; the official list is published and regularly updated on the tax authority website (see the list of platforms registered by the tax administration on impots.gouv.fr), and more than a hundred providers were already listed when the reform started. If you already use management, cash-register, invoicing or accounting software, it can continue to serve you provided it is a compatible solution connected to an approved platform, which should then let you forward invoices and the data the administration expects without changing tools. If you use no software at all, you will be able to create invoices directly on the approved platform you have chosen. Every company must designate its platform, for issuing and receiving electronic invoices and for declaring its data. To route invoices to the right platform, the State provides a central directory: Article 289 bis further provides (Article 289 bis of the CGI) that “l’Etat met un annuaire central à la disposition des plateformes agréées”, in other words a central directory built from data supplied by the platforms themselves. Keeping your company’s addressing data accurate in that directory is therefore part of compliance, and a change of platform is supervised by decree, with minimum continuity services from the former provider.

The content of invoices changes as well. The reform does not rewrite the classic list of mandatory details, but it adds four new ones: Four new mandatory details had to be added to invoices starting 1 September 2026, namely the customer’s SIREN number, the category of the invoiced operation (sale of goods, supply of services, or both), any option for paying VAT on debits (option pour le paiement de la TVA sur les débits, a cash-flow election available to certain service providers), and the full delivery address of the goods where it differs from the customer’s billing address. These join the long-standing requirements of commercial law. Article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code opens with the principle that “Tout achat de produits ou toute prestation de service pour une activité professionnelle fait l’objet d’une facturation”, and it requires names and addresses of the parties, dates, quantities, precise descriptions, unit prices excluding VAT, price reductions, payment dates, discount terms, penalty rates for late payment and the fixed recovery fee. It adds that “L’acheteur est tenu de la réclamer”: the customer must demand the invoice, which means your French company, as a customer of its own suppliers, must also organise itself to receive and store electronic invoices, not only to issue them.

A specific mechanism covers the situations foreign groups meet constantly: sales to private individuals and sales to customers established outside France. For sales to private individuals and to customers established outside France, the Ministry explains that the supplier keeps its usual invoicing channel and simply forwards the payment or transaction data to its approved platform, which passes them on to the administration. This is e-reporting (transmission de données de transaction): no electronic invoice travels to the foreign customer, but the data travels to the administration through your platform. A French subsidiary that re-invoices its American parent, a Paris SAS billing clients in Switzerland or the United Kingdom, or a company selling to French consumers must therefore configure e-reporting in addition to invoicing. The boundary is strict: e-reporting never replaces the electronic invoice where the latter is due, and the electronic invoice is never required where the customer is not a French-established taxable person.

II. How to comply from abroad, and what happens if you ignore the reform

A. Five practical steps to put your company in order without living in France

Compliance can be organised entirely at a distance, provided each step is documented and someone in France, typically your accountant, can act when a physical presence or a qualified signature is needed. The following sequence reflects the order in which the administration itself presents the work: understand your situation, choose your platform, fix your invoice content, organise storage, and monitor the flow.

First, determine exactly which obligations apply to your company and from which date. List the types of operations billed from France: domestic business-to-business supplies subject to VAT fall under electronic invoicing; supplies to private individuals, to customers established abroad and VAT-exempt operations fall under e-reporting or outside the reform, as explained above. Then confirm the size category of the French company, because it decides whether the issuing obligation started on 1 September 2026 or is deferred to 1 September 2027, while the receiving obligation already applies to everyone. Ask your accountant for a written note on both points and keep it with the company’s legal file (dossier juridique), next to the articles of association (statuts), the Kbis extract and the register of beneficial owners (registre des bénéficiaires effectifs, abbreviated RBE, the register identifying the individuals who ultimately control the company). A frequent and costly error is to assume that a French company with two employees is automatically a micro-enterprise: group links, turnover and balance-sheet figures decide, and the note should say so explicitly.

Secondly, choose and designate the approved platform. Compare providers on the official impots.gouv.fr list, checking that the platform covers both issuing and receiving, offers e-reporting, keeps invoices for the full legal retention period and provides real-time status tracking on the platform, with timestamping showing each stage of transmission, so you always know where an invoice stands in the circuit. If your company already runs invoicing or accounting software, ask the vendor in writing whether the solution is compatible with an approved platform and which connection mode it uses; keep that confirmation. Then designate the platform for the company, register the company’s addressing data for the central directory, and inform regular customers and suppliers of the change, so their systems route invoices to the right place. A national helpline exists for questions on the timetable and scope, and the Ministry also points companies toward their accountant, consular chambers and business networks.

Thirdly, bring the content of your invoices up to the new standard. Add the four new mandatory details to every template: customer SIREN, operation category, VAT-on-debits option where relevant, and delivery address where it differs from billing address. Review the classic details at the same time, because an invoice rejected by the customer’s system for missing data costs time and sometimes the commercial relationship. Particular attention is due to operations mixing goods and services, to deposits (acomptes) linked to taxable supplies, which Article 289 bis expressly includes in the electronic format, and to credit notes (avoirs), which follow the same channel. Have the accountant validate one specimen invoice per activity before the first real issue, and archive that validation email: it is your evidence of diligence if the administration later questions your process.

Fourthly, organise storage for the full legal period. French law imposes two overlapping retention duties that foreign directors often underestimate. For tax purposes, Article L. 102 B of the Tax Procedures Book (Livre des procédures fiscales) provides that books, registers, documents and papers subject to the administration’s rights of communication, investigation and audit “doivent être conservés pendant un délai de six ans à compter de la date de la dernière opération mentionnée sur les livres ou registres ou de la date à laquelle les documents ou pièces ont été établis”, and that documents created or received electronically must be kept in that form. For accounting purposes, Article L. 123-22 of the Commercial Code states that “Les documents comptables et les pièces justificatives sont conservés pendant dix ans”. Electronic invoices therefore live twice: on the platform, which centralises all supplier and customer invoices in one place, and in the company’s own archiving system with probative value, so that a platform change, a provider failure or a tax audit never leaves the company without its evidence. Verify contractually that the platform stores invoices for at least the longest applicable period and returns them in a usable format if you leave.

Fifthly, monitor the flow and react to anomalies in writing. Real-time statuses tell you when an invoice is deposited, received, accepted, refused or suspended; a refusal or a prolonged silence calls for immediate clarification with the customer, by a traceable message, not by resending the same PDF. This discipline matters far beyond the reform, because French courts draw consequences from the way businesses handle invoices. In a judgment of 25 October 2017, the Commercial Chamber of the Court of Cassation recalled the classic rule on general terms printed on invoices: acceptance of disputed terms “Elle peut, suivant les circonstances, être déduite de la réception sans protestation, dans le courant de relations d’affaires, de factures antérieures comportant la clause litigieuse” (Court of Cassation, Commercial Chamber, 25 October 2017, appeal No. 16-22.083). Receiving invoices without protest, in the course of an ongoing business relationship, can therefore amount to accepting the terms they carry, including retention-of-title or penalty clauses. Conversely, silence does not cure everything: where a customer unilaterally imposed a new operating and billing method, the Court of Cassation held that the court of appeal had failed to identify “les circonstances particulières qui lui ont permis de retenir que, malgré son silence, la société Datasolution avait acquiescé au changement du mode de fonctionnement, y compris la méthode de facturation”, and it quashed the ruling on that point (“CASSE ET ANNULE, mais seulement en ce qu’il rejette les demandes de paiement de la société Datasolution au titre des factures émises entre le 31 juillet 2017 et le 30 avril 2018 ainsi qu’au titre des factures émises les 31 mai 2017 et 30 juin 2017”) (Court of Cassation, Commercial Chamber, 26 February 2025, appeal No. 23-21.063, ECLI:FR:CCASS:2025:CO00100). The lesson for a director at a distance is symmetrical: protest in writing and without delay when a supplier changes the billing method or when an invoice looks wrong, and never treat your own silence, or your customer’s silence, as an agreement.

B. Fines, formal notices and court lessons: 50 euros per invoice, up to 375,000 euros for defective billing, and why the administration sees everything

The reform pairs its technical obligations with a dedicated scale of tax fines, and it leaves the older commercial fines fully applicable. Both can strike a company whose director lives abroad, because they are notified to the company at its registered office and published procedures do not wait for the director’s travel plans.

The tax scale sits in Article 1737 of the CGI. Where a taxable person fails to issue an invoice in electronic form as required by Article 289 bis, the text provides that “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 invoice may look modest, but a company issuing hundreds of invoices a month reaches the annual ceiling of 15,000 euros quickly, year after year, and the fine applies per invoice even where the VAT itself was correctly declared and paid. Platforms face their own scale: breaches of their data-transmission duties carry 50 euros per invoice up to 45,000 euros per calendar year, and where a business fails to use an approved platform to receive electronic invoices, the administration first serves a formal notice giving three months to comply (“elle le met en demeure de s’y conformer dans un délai de trois mois”) before fining. The same article keeps the older weapons loaded: disguising the identity of suppliers or customers, issuing invoices for fictitious supplies, or failing to issue invoices and to record transactions can draw a fine equal to 50 percent of the amounts concerned, capped at 375,000 euros per financial year, and “Toute omission ou inexactitude constatée dans les factures” draws 15 euros per error, capped at one quarter of the invoice amount. An invoice can therefore be punished twice: once for the wrong channel under the e-invoicing rules, once for missing or inaccurate details under the classic rules.

The commercial scale is heavier still. Article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code punishes any breach of the invoicing duties with an administrative fine that “ne peut excéder 75 000 € pour une personne physique et 375 000 € pour une personne morale”, and the maximum doubles, to 150,000 and 750,000 euros respectively, for a repeated breach within two years of the first sanction becoming final. These fines are imposed by the competition and consumer authority (Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes, abbreviated DGCCRF) after an adversarial procedure, and they apply per breach found during an inspection, for example systematically missing payment-deadline mentions or penalty rates across a company’s invoices. A foreign-owned company is inspected like any other: controllers visit the registered office, the establishment or the accountant’s premises, examine the invoicing system, and serve the statement of objections on the company. Distance complicates the defence, because deadlines run from notification, so the director should give the accountant and the platform written instructions on who receives administrative mail and who alerts the director the same day.

The courts add a third layer of risk that no fine schedule captures: an invoice shapes the contract itself. The two judgments cited above show both directions. Under the 2017 ruling, terms printed on earlier invoices, received without protest in an ongoing relationship, can bind the customer, so a company that never reads its suppliers’ electronic invoices may discover it accepted a retention-of-title clause, a jurisdiction clause or a penalty rate it never negotiated. Under the 2025 ruling, a supplier cannot impose a new billing method by silence and then rely on unpaid invoices issued under that method, so a company whose customer suddenly rejects invoices issued through a new platform must address the disagreement immediately rather than pile up uncontested invoices. In both cases the decisive evidence was written: prior invoices with their backs, emails describing the operating method, protests or the absence of protests. Electronic invoicing, with its timestamped statuses on the platform, actually makes this evidence easier to keep, provided someone reads the statuses and files the anomalies.

Contesting a fine or an assessment follows the ordinary routes and starts with the file you built in advance. Against a DGCCRF fine, the company contests the reality of the breach, the regularity of the inspection and the proportionality of the amount before the administrative court, within two months of notification. Against a tax fine under Article 1737, the company first files a claim (réclamation) with the tax administration, then appeals to the administrative court if the claim is rejected, expressly or implicitly. Against a customer’s refusal to pay an electronic invoice, the company sues for payment before the commercial court, relying on the contract, the delivery evidence and the platform’s transmission and acceptance logs. In each forum, the specimen invoice validated by the accountant, the platform designation records, the directory data, the status history and the written protests form the backbone of the defence. None of this requires the director to live in France; all of it requires the director to organise, from abroad, a company that behaves as if he were present.

Conclusion

Since 1 September 2026, a French company must receive electronic invoices through an approved platform, large and intermediate-sized companies must also issue them in that form, and small companies join the issuing side on 1 September 2027, with e-reporting covering sales to private individuals and foreign customers throughout. The compliant invoice is structured data with all mandatory details, old and new, travelling from platform to platform, not a PDF in an inbox. The price of indifference is measured: 50 euros per invoice up to 15,000 euros a year for the wrong channel, up to 375,000 euros for defective or missing invoices, and a case law that turns unread or unprotested invoices into binding commitments. A foreign owner who designates a platform, fixes invoice content, organises ten-year storage and monitors statuses from abroad puts the company on the safe side of the reform; one who waits for 2027, or for a first fine, will pay for the delay.