If you run a French company while living abroad, 1 September 2026 changes how you bill. From that date, every company established in France that is subject to value added tax (VAT) must be able to receive electronic invoices from its French suppliers through a compliant channel, and large and mid-sized companies must also issue their business-to-business (B2B) invoices for domestic transactions in structured electronic form. Smaller companies follow for issuance on 1 September 2027. The tax administration also starts collecting transaction data continuously, a mechanism called e-reporting, which covers your sales to private consumers, your cross-border deals and the payment data behind them. For a founder who signs, pays and files from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, this is not an IT detail. An invoice that does not travel through the right platform is an invoice the law treats as missing, with a fine of 50 euros per invoice, capped at 15,000 euros per calendar year, plus 15 euros per omission or inaccuracy on mandatory mentions. Your customer, meanwhile, must still pay you within the French statutory payment periods, and your late-payment penalties and 40-euro recovery indemnity must appear on the invoice itself. This guide explains, in English and with the French acronyms decoded, what the reform requires from a foreign-run French company, which calendar applies to you, what e-reporting adds on top of e-invoicing, and how to organise the switch from abroad without blocking your billing, your VAT returns or your proof in court.

I. What France now requires from a company run from abroad

A. Every French company must receive e-invoices from 1 September 2026 and issue them on a staggered calendar

The starting point is the general invoicing duty. Under Article 289 of the French Tax Code (Code général des impôts), every taxable person must ensure that an invoice is issued for each supply of goods or services to another taxable person or to a non-taxable legal person, for the exempt cross-border supplies it lists, and for advance payments received before the transaction is carried out. The invoice must in principle be issued as soon as the supply is performed, and a copy of every invoice issued must be kept. That duty already applied to your French company whether you manage it from Paris or from abroad. What the reform adds is the channel: for domestic B2B transactions, the invoice must now circulate in structured electronic form through the public invoicing portal or a registered partner platform, so that the tax administration receives the data at the same time as your customer receives the invoice.

The timetable published by the tax administration and relayed on the official business portal is simple to state and easy to get wrong. From 1 September 2026, all companies, whatever their size, must be able to receive electronic invoices. On the same date, the duty to issue electronic invoices applies to large companies and intermediate-sized companies (ETI, entreprises de taille intermédiaire). On 1 September 2027, the issue duty extends to small and medium-sized companies and to micro-enterprises. In practice, if your French vehicle is a small SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible joint-stock company most foreign founders choose) or a SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company with stricter share transfer rules), you must be ready to receive compliant e-invoices in September 2026 but you issue them mandatorily from September 2027. If your group exceeds the ETI thresholds, issuance starts in 2026. The official English-language presentation of the reform hosted on the tax administration site and the Service-Public Entreprendre notice on electronic invoicing confirm this two-step calendar, the universal reception duty, and the extension of the same calendar to the transmission of transaction data known as e-reporting.

Concretely, receiving means designating, for each SIREN (Système d’identification du répertoire des entreprises, the nine-digit number that identifies your company, extended by five digits into the SIRET that identifies each establishment), the address where your suppliers’ platforms must deliver your invoices: either the public portal (PPF, portail public de facturation, the free state-run hub that succeeds Chorus Pro for this purpose) or a partner platform (PDP, plateforme de dématérialisation partenaire, a private platform registered with the administration). Issuing means producing the invoice in one of the three accepted structured formats, Factur-X, UBL (Universal Business Language) or CII (Cross Industry Invoice), and sending it through that same circuit so that the mandatory data reaches your customer and the administration together. A PDF sent by email, however clean, is no longer enough for a domestic B2B invoice once your issuance date has passed. Founders living abroad should therefore treat the summer of 2026 as the deadline to choose their channel, register their SIREN numbers on it, and test one real invoice with a friendly French customer before the obligation bites.

Two traps catch foreign-run companies in particular. First, the founder who confuses the reception duty with the issuance calendar and does nothing until 2027 discovers in September 2026 that suppliers’ platforms cannot deliver invoices to a company that has declared no receiving address, and purchase invoices start bouncing while the bookkeeper waits. Second, the group that reads only the French-language press and assumes the 2027 date applies to everyone misses that its French subsidiary, consolidated into a foreign group above the ETI thresholds, must issue from 2026. The size test applies per company liable in France, assessed on the standard thresholds, and the prudent course when you sit near a threshold is to be issuance-ready in 2026. An issuance-ready small company loses nothing; a late large company gains fines.

The sanction for ignoring the channel is now written into the Tax Code. Under Article 1737 of the French Tax Code, failure by a taxable person to issue an invoice in electronic form as required gives rise to a fine of 50 euros per invoice, with total fines for the same calendar year capped at 15,000 euros. The same article punishes platforms that fail to transmit the data, and it organises a formal notice procedure, with a three-month compliance period, for companies that refuse to use a registered platform to receive e-invoices. These fines sit on top of the older ones that foreign founders sometimes discover too late: 15 euros per omission or inaccuracy on an invoice, with the total per invoice capped at one quarter of the invoiced amount, and, in cases of disguised identity, fictitious invoices or missing invoices for real transactions, a fine of 50 percent of the sums at stake. E-invoicing does not replace invoice discipline; it automates its control.

B. E-reporting adds a second layer: your B2C sales, cross-border deals and payment data go to the tax office too

E-invoicing covers domestic transactions between taxable persons. E-reporting covers everything else the administration wants to see in near real time: your sales to private consumers (B2C, business-to-consumer), your cross-border sales and purchases within the European Union and outside it, and the payment status of the invoices concerned. If you run your French company from abroad, this second layer is often the one that hurts, because the classic foreign-founder business model, a French SAS selling services from Paris to customers in London, New York or Dubai, or a French e-shop shipping to consumers across Europe, sits squarely inside e-reporting while the founder assumed only French-to-French invoices were concerned.

The mechanism differs from e-invoicing in one essential way: there is no invoice to deliver to a French taxable customer through the platform, so instead you transmit the transaction data itself, either through your partner platform or through the public portal, within the deadlines set by decree. For B2C and cross-border flows, that means the amount, the VAT treatment applied, the customer category and, for services, the collection data. The policy purpose is explicit: generalise pre-filled VAT returns, cross-check the VAT your company deducts against the VAT your suppliers declare, and close the gap between the VAT due and the VAT collected. The practical consequence for you is that your billing tool must be able to tag every sale with the right flow, domestic B2B, intra-EU supply, export, B2C service, and push the corresponding data on time. A founder who keeps one undifferentiated invoice template for all customers will feed the platform dirty data and spend the following quarter explaining inconsistencies to the accountant.

The VAT backbone behind both layers is familiar but worth restating, because foreign founders regularly misread it. Under Article 283 of the French Tax Code, VAT is normally payable by the supplier, with the well-known reverse-charge exceptions for intra-EU acquisitions and for certain services supplied to taxable customers established in France. Under Article 286 of the French Tax Code, every person liable for VAT must keep accounts detailed enough to justify the amounts declared, make them available to the administration, and more generally comply with the invoicing and record-keeping duties the Code organises. E-reporting grafts itself onto these duties: the data you transmit must reconcile with the VAT return (déclaration de TVA) your accountant files, usually monthly or quarterly through the impots.gouv.fr professional account. For more on the VAT return cycle itself, from registration to reverse charge, refunds and penalties, read our companion guide on VAT registration, reverse charge, returns and penalties for companies run from abroad, which this article completes on the invoicing side.

Cross-border founders should pay special attention to three data points. First, the intra-EU supply of goods ex exempt in France only if the transport, the acquirer’s EU VAT number and the recapitulative statement line up; transmitting e-reporting data that contradicts your Intrastat or your European sales listing invites an automated query. Second, services billed to foreign business customers are often taxable where the customer is established, which means no French VAT on the invoice but a mention of the reverse charge and a corresponding e-reporting line; forgetting that line makes the transaction invisible while your bank statements show the receipt. Third, the payment date matters because the administration uses collection data to verify chargeability: for goods, VAT is generally due on delivery, while for services it is generally due on payment, subject to the option to pay on debit. Your platform must therefore track not only issuance but collection, and your contracts should define when a service is deemed performed so that the data, the return and the cash match.

The good news is that the same investment serves both layers. Once your SIREN numbers are registered, your formats are compliant and your flows are tagged, e-invoicing feeds your domestic data and e-reporting feeds the rest through the same pipe. Companies that treat the reform as a pure tax constraint miss half the benefit: structured invoices reconcile faster, disputes over whether an invoice was received become rare, because delivery through the platform is traceable, and your accountant stops retyping PDFs. The companies that suffer are the ones that keep a parallel manual circuit, paper here, email there, platform for one big customer, because every parallel circuit doubles the risk of contradiction between what you declared, what you transmitted and what you can prove.

II. How to comply from abroad without blocking your business

A. Choose your channel, fix your invoice mentions and keep your payment terms enforceable

Start with the channel decision, because everything else hangs from it. You have three practical options. You can use the public portal directly, which costs nothing and suits a company with few invoices and no complex approval workflow. You can register with a partner platform, which suits a company with volume, foreign-currency billing, multi-entity flows or an approval chain between the founder abroad and the team in France. Or you can keep your current billing software and connect it through an accredited operator that relays to the portal. The question to ask each candidate is concrete: does it handle Factur-X, UBL and CII in both issuance and reception, does it manage e-reporting for B2C and cross-border flows, does it track payment status, does it archive for the full retention period, and does it let a director living abroad sign, validate and consult from outside France with proper access rights? A platform that cannot show the SIREN directory lookup, the delivery receipt and the ten-year archive is not a compliance solution.

Next, audit your invoice template, because the platform will carry your mentions, not correct them. Under Article L441-9 of the Commercial Code (Code de commerce), every purchase of products or services for a professional activity must be invoiced, the seller must deliver the invoice upon performance, the buyer must claim it, and each party must keep a copy within the tax retention period. The article then lists what the invoice must show: the names and addresses of the parties, plus the billing address if different, the date of the sale or service, the quantity, precise description, unit price excluding VAT, any price reduction acquired at the date of sale and directly linked to the transaction, the date payment is due, the discount terms for early payment, the late-penalty rate payable from the day after the due date, the flat recovery indemnity due on late payment, and the purchase order number when the buyer issued one. A breach exposes the company to an administrative fine of up to 75,000 euros for a natural person and 375,000 euros for a legal person, doubled on repeat offending within two years. Foreign founders should read that list with their own template on screen: missing billing address of the customer, missing due date, missing penalty rate and missing recovery indemnity are the four omissions our practice sees most in companies run from abroad.

The penalty rate and the recovery indemnity deserve emphasis because they are your enforcement tools and the reform does not remove them. Under Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code, the agreed payment period cannot exceed sixty days from the invoice date, or forty-five days end-of-month by express contract without manifest abuse toward the creditor, with a default of thirty days from receipt of the goods or performance of the service. Late penalties accrue by right from the day after the due date without any reminder, at the rate stated on the invoice, which defaults, absent a contrary clause that may never fall below three times the legal interest rate, to the European Central Bank refinancing rate plus ten points. On top of those penalties, Article D441-5 of the Commercial Code fixes the flat recovery indemnity at 40 euros per late invoice, automatically due alongside the penalties. In plain terms: keep your payment terms short, print the ECB-plus-ten rate or a higher contractual rate, print the 40 euros, and enforce both as soon as the platform shows the due date has passed. An e-invoice with no penalty clause is a compliant invoice that leaves money on the table.

Three further mentions routinely trip up foreign-run companies. First, the VAT line: show the price excluding tax, the applicable rate and the VAT amount in euros, using the conversion mechanism of the Tax Code when you bill in dollars, pounds or dirhams, and state the legal basis whenever you bill without French VAT, such as an intra-EU supply, an export or a reverse charge. Second, the company identifiers: your SIREN number, the RCS (registre du commerce et des sociétés, the trade and companies register kept by the greffe, the court clerk’s office) registration with the city, the share capital and the registered office must appear as French practice expects, because counterparties and platforms use them to route and match. Third, the Kbis (the official extract of your RCS registration, the identity card of your company, obtained after filing with the Guichet Unique, the single online business filing portal): make sure the details on your invoices match the Kbis exactly, including the corporate name and legal form, since a mismatch between the invoice header and the registered data is the kind of inconsistency automated cross-checks love.

Finally, organise validation from abroad. Designate who can issue, who validates above a threshold, and who reconciles the platform feed with the bank account. A common workable pattern is: the team in France prepares the draft in the billing tool, the founder abroad validates electronically, the platform issues and archives, and the accountant reads the same feed for the VAT return. Put that pattern in writing, with named substitutes for holiday periods, because the reform’s deadlines do not pause when the founder travels. And keep one golden rule: no invoice leaves the company outside the platform once your issuance duty applies, however urgent the customer says the order is. An off-circuit invoice is not a favour to the customer; it is a missing invoice with a 50-euro ticket attached.

B. Archive for ten years, protect your proof and correct mistakes through the platform

The reform changes the plumbing, not the underlying duties of proof and preservation. Under Article L123-22 of the Commercial Code, accounting documents are drawn up in euros and in French, and accounting documents and supporting records, which include your invoices, must be kept for ten years, without blanks or alterations. Your platform’s archive must therefore guarantee authenticity of origin, integrity of content and legibility from issuance until the end of the retention period, and it must be able to produce a given invoice, with its delivery receipt and its payment trail, years later, in a form the tax auditor and the commercial court can read. When you compare platforms from abroad, ask where the archive sits, who can export it if you change provider, and in which format. A compliant pipe with a non-portable archive is a trap: you satisfy this year’s obligation and lose next year’s proof.

Proof is where foreign founders win or lose their French commercial disputes. Before the commercial courts, an accepted invoice, one the customer received without protest within a reasonable time, carries real weight as evidence of the contract and its performance, especially between merchants where free proof applies, while a contested invoice must be corroborated by correspondence, delivery notes, timesheets or payment records. The platform strengthens this logic: the delivery receipt shows the invoice reached the customer’s designated address, the structured content shows exactly what was billed, and the payment tracking shows what followed. Conversely, a company that keeps billing partly outside the platform weakens its own files, because the customer can truthfully say the invoice now produced was never delivered through the agreed channel. Practical advice: keep your general terms of sale aligned with your platform data, define the delivery address contractually, and treat any customer request to bill outside the platform as a red flag to be refused in writing.

Mistakes will happen, and the system is designed to absorb them if you correct through the right circuit. A credit note, an amended invoice or any document that specifically and unambiguously refers to the initial invoice is treated as an invoice and must carry the full set of mentions. Do not fix an error with a free-text email, a discount on the next order or a quietly reissued PDF with the same number: cancel or credit through the platform, reference the original invoice number and date, and reissue cleanly. The same discipline applies to advance payments, which must be invoiced when received, and to periodic invoices covering several supplies to the same customer within one calendar month. Each correction leaves a trace the administration can follow, which is precisely the point: a visible, referenced correction reads as diligence, while a silent rewrite reads as concealment and attracts the 50-percent penalty for fictitious or missing invoices.

Two final risks deserve a paragraph each. First, language and currency. You may bill in English and in foreign currency, which foreign founders naturally prefer, but the amounts of VAT payable must be stated in euros, and the tax office may require a French translation of a foreign-language invoice for control purposes. Configure your template so the euro VAT line and the conversion rate print automatically, and keep a French version of your standard descriptions available. Second, the human factor. Train the one person in France who prepares invoices and the accountant who reads the feed in the same session, write a one-page procedure in English with the French terms alongside, and schedule a quarterly reconciliation between the platform log, the accounting software and the VAT returns. Most e-invoicing failures our practice anticipates are not software failures but handover failures: the founder abroad assumed the bookkeeper had registered the SIREN, the bookkeeper assumed the founder had chosen the platform, and September arrived with nobody connected.

Conclusion

For a company run from abroad, the French e-invoicing reform rewards one quality above all: treating billing as a single compliant circuit from contract to collection. Register each SIREN on the public portal or a partner platform in time to receive from 1 September 2026, be ready to issue in structured format from 2026 if you sit above the size thresholds and from 2027 if you do not, and feed your B2C and cross-border data through e-reporting on the same timetable. Keep your mandatory mentions complete, your payment terms short, your ECB-plus-ten penalties and your 40-euro indemnity printed and enforced, and your archive portable for ten years. Correct every error visibly through the platform, reconcile the transmitted data with each VAT return, and refuse any parallel billing circuit. Do that, and the reform becomes what it promises: faster reconciliation, traceable delivery, fewer disputes over receipt, and a VAT file that matches on every screen the auditor opens. Leave the circuit half-built, and the same automation produces fines per invoice, mismatched returns and weakened proof. The calendar is known, the formats are known, the penalties are written; the only variable left is whether your company connects in time.