Since 1 September 2026, your French company must receive electronic invoices, and if it is a large company or an intermediate-sized company it must also issue them in electronic form. A simple PDF attached to an email no longer counts. The reform applies even when you run the company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, because the obligation attaches to the French entity, not to where its director sits. This guide explains, for a foreign founder or foreign group, what changed, which invoices must now travel through an approved platform, which format and mandatory details make them valid, how payment deadlines and late penalties interact with the new circuit, and which fines apply if you stay on paper.

France calls the company register extract a Kbis (the identity card of the company, issued by the greffe, the clerk’s office of the commercial court), the social contributions collector URSSAF, the official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements BODACC, the tax code the CGI (Code général des impôts), value added tax VAT (TVA in French), and the tax administration the DGFiP (Direction générale des Finances publiques). An approved platform is a plateforme agréée, a dematerialisation provider registered with the administration that routes electronic invoices between companies and transmits data to the tax office. A compatible solution (solution compatible) is ordinary billing software that connects to an approved platform. The directory that routes invoices to the right recipient platform is the annuaire. Electronic invoicing between businesses is e-invoicing; the transmission of transaction data for sales to individuals or to foreign customers is e-reporting. If you are still choosing the vehicle for your French presence, read our pillar guide on setting up a company in France as a foreign founder before organising the billing circuit described here.

I. What must your French company do now for e-invoicing when you run it from abroad?

A. Which invoices must go through an approved platform, and by which date?

The calendar published by the Ministry of the Economy is clear and it is already running. Since 1 September 2026, every business of every size must be able to receive electronic invoices, while large companies and intermediate-sized companies must issue all their invoices in electronic form and transmit their e-reporting data. On 1 September 2027, small and medium-sized companies and micro-businesses must in turn issue electronically and transmit their transaction data. The official Ministry of the Economy page on e-invoicing confirms the reform entered into force on 1 September 2026 with exactly this two-step timetable, and the practical guide for the launch confirms the same dates. A French subsidiary (filiale, a separate French company owned by the foreign parent), a French branch (succursale, a registration of the foreign company itself, without separate legal personality), and a small SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible simplified joint-stock company most foreign founders choose) are all concerned as soon as they are established in France and carry out domestic business-to-business transactions subject to VAT. Size is assessed at company or group level under the usual thresholds, so a small French subsidiary of a large foreign group should check with its accountant whether the group classification pulls it into the 2026 issuing wave rather than the 2027 wave.

The starting point in the tax code is unchanged: 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 taxable person must ensure that an invoice is issued, by itself or in its name and on its behalf. What the reform changes is the channel and the form for domestic business-to-business invoices: they must be issued in a standardised electronic format and routed through an approved platform chosen by each company, directly or via a compatible solution. The Ministry states this in plain terms: invoices must follow a standardised electronic form and travel to the customer through an approved platform, so a scanned paper invoice, an ordinary PDF or a document sent by email is no longer compliant for the transactions in scope. A scanned paper invoice, an ordinary PDF or a document sent by email is therefore no longer compliant for the transactions in scope. Your customer can still ask for a readable copy, but the legal original is the structured message that travelled from platform to platform with its statuses and timestamp.

Reception is the trap most foreign-run companies fall into, because it applies to everyone now, including the smallest SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company with heavier statutory mechanics) or SASU (société par actions simplifiée unipersonnelle, the one-person SAS) managed from abroad. Even if your French company issues only a handful of invoices per year and benefits from the 2027 deferral for issuing, it must already designate its platform, be listed in the directory, and actually retrieve supplier invoices there. Supplier invoices that arrive only by email after September 2026 are not received through the compliant circuit, and the administration can put the company on notice to use an approved platform for reception, as explained in Part II. Practically, this means the founder abroad must organise access: who logs into the platform, who validates the invoice, who pushes it into accounting, and who answers a supplier who says its invoice is “waiting on your platform”. Companies that centralise everything in the foreign head office mailbox and never open the French platform account discover the backlog at year-end, when the accountant asks for the missing originals.

Transactions with private individuals and with foreign operators follow a different track that still runs through your platform. The Ministry explains that where the customer is an individual or established abroad, the supplier sends the invoice through the usual channel and transmits only the payment or transaction data to its approved platform, which forwards it to the administration When the customer is an individual or established abroad, the supplier sends the invoice through the usual channel and transmits only the payment or transaction data to its approved platform, which forwards it to the administration. This is e-reporting. For a foreign founder this matters in three frequent patterns. First, a French operating subsidiary that sells to French consumers must e-report that turnover even though no e-invoice circulates. Second, a French company that invoices its own foreign parent for management fees or recharges sends the invoice as before but reports the data. Third, purchases from a supplier established outside France trigger the reverse-charge logic described below, and the French customer self-accounts the VAT on its return under Article 283 of the CGI, which organises reverse charge: where the supplier is established outside France, French VAT on the supply is paid by the buyer When the supply is made by a taxable person not established in France, the tax is paid by the purchaser. Your platform or your accountant must therefore be set up for both flows, e-invoicing for domestic business-to-business and e-reporting for the rest, because the administration cross-checks the two datasets.

Choosing the platform is a management decision the foreign director cannot delegate blindly. The list of registered platforms is published and updated on the tax administration website, and already counts around one hundred providers. If you already use cash-register, billing or accounting software, check whether it is a compatible solution that forwards invoices to a registered platform, or whether you must subscribe to a platform directly and create invoices there. If you use no software, you can create invoices directly on the chosen platform. From abroad, favour a platform with English-language support, multi-user rights with an audit trail, delegated access for your French accountant (expert-comptable), and status tracking with timestamps, because the platform statuses become your evidence that the invoice was issued, delivered, and made available. Record the designation in a short written procedure: name of the platform, account owner, back-up user, directory parameters, and the rule that no domestic business-to-business invoice leaves the company except through that channel. That one-page memo, kept with the corporate records, answers most auditor questions about who does what when the director lives in another time zone.

B. Which format and mandatory details make the invoice valid from September 2026?

A compliant electronic invoice combines three layers: a standardised format, the full set of mandatory details, and transmission through the platform. The formats accepted are the European standard profiles, in practice Factur-X (the Franco-German hybrid format that pairs a readable PDF with embedded structured XML data), UBL (Universal Business Language, a pure structured syntax), and CII (Cross Industry Invoice, the UN/CEFACT syntax). Your software or platform generates one of these; you do not hand-craft XML. What you must control is the data quality inside, because the platform transmits what you enter and the administration fines omissions per invoice. Commercial law has always required invoicing for professional purchases: Article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code states that “Tout achat de produits ou toute prestation de service pour une activité professionnelle fait l’objet d’une facturation.” Every purchase of products or provision of services for a professional activity must be invoiced. The tax code then refers to a decree for the detail: Article 289 of the CGI provides that “Un décret en Conseil d’Etat fixe les mentions obligatoires qui doivent figurer sur les factures”, and the operative decree text for foreign founders is Article 242 nonies A of Annex II to the CGI, which lists the identification of the parties, the goods or services, and the VAT calculation. Since the reform, the invoice must carry these details in dedicated structured fields, not lost in a free-text PDF box, so that the recipient platform and the administration can read them automatically.

In practice the checklist for a French company run from abroad starts with identity. The invoice must show the name and address of each party and, where different, the billing address, plus the SIREN number (the nine-digit identifier of the legal entity issued at registration, visible on the Kbis), the VAT identification numbers of supplier and customer, the invoice number in a continuous chronological sequence, the date of issue, the date of the sale or service, and the order number when the buyer issued one. Recent additions that foreign templates often miss include the SIREN of each party, the legal category of the invoice (ordinary, deposit, credit note), and the nature of the transaction (delivery of goods, supply of services, or both). Amounts must be broken down per rate: quantity, precise description, unit price excluding VAT, any price reduction acquired at the date of sale and directly linked to the transaction, the VAT rate, the amount of tax per rate, and the totals excluding and including tax. Where reverse charge applies, typically when the supplier is established outside France and the French customer self-accounts the tax, the invoice must carry the words “Autoliquidation” and the administration expects the customer to identify the amount on the return mentioned in Article 287. Amounts may be expressed in any currency provided the tax is stated in euros using the conversion mechanism of Article 266, and where the invoice is written in a foreign language the tax office may require a French translation for control purposes. A template inherited from the US or UK parent that shows only a total, a single “VAT 20%” line and no SIREN will therefore be rejected by the platform validation or, worse, accepted by a tolerant platform and fined later per invoice.

Commercial details required by the Commercial Code must also appear, and they are the ones that protect your cash flow. Article L. 441-9 of the Commercial Code requires the invoice to state the date on which payment falls due, the discount terms for early payment, the rate of late penalties payable the day after that date, and the fixed recovery fee due if payment arrives late, plus the order number. Many foreign founders copy a head-office template that omits the penalty rate and the 40-euro recovery fee, which weakens every later collection letter. Insert the exact clause in English with the French legal anchor, for example: Late penalties at the ECB refinancing rate plus 10 points, payable without reminder the day after the due date shown, plus the 40 euro fixed recovery fee, and mirror it in the general terms. The platform does not write this for you; it only carries the fields. Review the template once, in both languages, with your accountant, then lock it so that no employee or external provider can issue an invoice outside the template.

Authenticity, integrity and legibility must be guaranteed from issue until the end of the retention period. Article 289 of the CGI structures this through its paragraphs V to VII on electronic form and audit trail, and the platform circuit now provides the technical backbone: issued and received in electronic form, routed, timestamped, and tracked through statuses. The Ministry confirms the operational benefit: when a supplier invoice arrives on your platform you are notified quickly, and the statuses let you know in real time, through timestamping, at which stage of the transmission circuit the invoice stands. Do not defeat this design by re-issuing the same invoice by email “to be safe”, because duplicates create disputes about which document is the original. Any document that specifically and unambiguously amends the initial invoice and refers to it is treated as an invoice itself and must carry the full details, so corrections pass through a credit note (avoir) on the same platform circuit, never through a free email asking the customer to read 1,200 instead of 12,000. Keep the original, issue the credit note, re-issue if needed, and let the statuses show the chain.

II. How do you stay paid and avoid fines when you invoice from abroad?

A. How do payment deadlines, late penalties and proof work on e-invoices?

Electronic form does not change the payment deadline, but it makes the deadline visible to everyone and therefore harder to dispute. Article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code sets the default at thirty days after receipt of the goods or performance of the service, and caps the negotiated term: “Le délai convenu entre les parties pour régler les sommes dues ne peut dépasser soixante jours après la date d’émission de la facture”, with a possible forty-five days end-of-month if expressly agreed and not manifestly abusive. The same article fixes the penalty mechanics: unless otherwise agreed within the legal floor, the rate equals the European Central Bank refinancing rate plus ten percentage points, the rate for the first half-year being the rate in force on 1 January and for the second half-year the rate in force on 1 July. Penalties accrue by operation of law: “Les pénalités de retard sont exigibles sans qu’un rappel soit nécessaire.” No reminder is needed. On top of penalties, every late-paying professional owes a fixed recovery fee set by decree at 40 euros, plus documented additional recovery costs. The Cour de cassation restated the backbone in its judgment of 24 April 2024, pourvoi No. 22-24.275 (decision of 24 April 2024), holding that “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”. Payment conditions must state how late penalties apply and at which rate from the day after the settlement date shown on the invoice. An invoice without a due date and without a penalty rate is therefore not a neutral omission; it is the document that deprives you of the automatic penalty the court would otherwise enforce.

The same judgment confirms that these commercial penalties live alongside ordinary civil delay interest and are not absorbed by it, which matters when your claim reaches court. The court recalled the two tracks: commercial penalties under what is now Article L. 441-10, and civil damages for delay under former Article 1153 and current Article 1231-6 of the Civil Code, under which damages for late payment of money consist of statutory interest from formal notice. Foreign creditors sometimes hesitate between the two; the answer is that the commercial track applies automatically between professionals once the invoice states the rate and the due date, without any demand letter, while the civil track can complement the claim where the conditions are met. Plead both where appropriate, compute each on its own base and period, and let the platform timestamp prove the date of issue and the due date. A second decision is useful when the debtor argues that it is not a trader and therefore escapes commercial penalties. In its judgment of 21 October 2020, pourvoi No. 18-25.749 (decision of 21 October 2020), the Commercial Chamber was asked to apply the rule that “les pénalités dues en cas de retard de paiement sont calculées en appliquant le taux d’intérêt appliqué par la Banque centrale européenne à son opération de refinancement la plus récente majoré de dix points de pourcentage”, and to decide that “ces dispositions s’appliquent à tout contrat de vente ou de prestation de service conclu entre professionnels, même non commerçants”. The penalties apply to any sale or service contract between professionals, even non-traders. A property company, an association acting professionally, or a foreign group buying through its French vehicle cannot escape the penalty clause by saying it is not a commerçant (a person carrying on commercial acts as its usual profession). For the foreign founder this closes a frequent defence: your French small business invoices a large French customer, the customer pays at ninety days under its own purchasing terms, and claims commercial penalties do not apply to it. They do.

Proof is where e-invoicing helps the creditor who lives abroad, provided the underlying obligation is documented. Between traders, commercial acts can be proved by any means: Article L. 110-3 of the Commercial Code states that “A l’égard des commerçants, les actes de commerce peuvent se prouver par tous moyens à moins qu’il n’en soit autrement disposé par la loi.” The mirror rule in civil law is Article 1353 of the Civil Code: “Celui qui réclame l’exécution d’une obligation doit la prouver.” Whoever claims performance must prove the obligation. An invoice alone, even electronic, does not prove the contract; it proves that you issued a structured demand through the compliant circuit. What proves the debt is the bundle: signed order or contract, proof of delivery or performance, the e-invoice with its platform statuses and timestamp, reminders, and the absence of timely protest. The platform statuses add a layer that paper never gave: issue, deposit, making available, acceptance or refusal, and payment status, each timestamped. When the debtor stays silent for months and then claims it never received the invoice or never ordered the service, you produce the platform log showing delivery to its platform and the contract showing the order, and the court draws the consequences. Conversely, when you are the debtor and a French supplier claims penalties on an invoice you never saw because nobody opened the platform account, the log will show that the invoice was made available and that your company failed to collect it, which does not stop the penalty clock. Organise a weekly platform review with a named person and a substitute, including during August and year-end holidays, because silence on the platform is treated as receipt, not as absence.

Computation deserves a worked method because foreign finance teams often apply the wrong rate. Take the ECB refinancing rate in force on 1 January for a payment due in the first half-year, or on 1 July for the second half-year, add ten points, and apply that annual rate pro rata temporis from the day after the due date shown on the invoice until full payment, without any reminder. Add the 40-euro fixed fee per invoice paid late, and keep evidence of any higher collection costs (bailiff fees, lawyer time, platform extraction costs) to claim the supplement the statute allows. Suspend neither penalties nor fee because the debtor opened insolvency proceedings that freeze payment at maturity; the statute expressly withholds the fee in that case, and penalties follow the insolvency regime for declaration and ranking. Bill penalties on a separate debit note or on the next statement rather than by editing the original invoice, keep the original intact in the platform, and send the penalty computation with the rate source and the day count so the debtor’s accounts department can book it without asking for “a proper invoice”. Precision here shortens disputes: a debtor who receives a one-line “penalties 800 euros” challenges it, while a debtor who receives the ECB rate, the period, the day count and the platform timestamp pays it or negotiates the principal.

B. What checks, corrections and records keep you safe from fines and audits?

The fine grid is now two-headed: tax fines for electronic-form breaches and commercial fines for missing or wrong details. On the tax side, Article 1737 of the CGI 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 outside the electronic form, capped at 15,000 euros per calendar year. The same article fines the approved platform 50 euros per invoice for data-transmission failures, capped at 45,000 euros per year, which gives you a contractual lever: require your platform contract to pass through any fine caused by its proven fault and to provide the transmission logs you need to defend yourself. Reception has its own track: where the administration finds that the company does not use an approved platform for receiving electronic invoices, “elle le met en demeure de s’y conformer dans un délai de trois mois”, then fines of 500 euros, then 1,000 euros, renewed every three months while non-compliance persists after further formal notice. The first formal notice therefore starts a clock you must diary from abroad; instruct your accountant to forward any such notice within 24 hours and to confirm platform activation in writing before the three months expire. A first unintentional breach repaired spontaneously or within thirty days of a first request escapes the per-invoice fines under paragraph V, which rewards companies that fix the circuit as soon as the administration points to the gap.

Omissions and inaccuracies in the details carry a separate 15-euro fine per missing or wrong item, with the total per invoice capped at one quarter of the amount shown or that should have been shown, and deliberate manoeuvres such as disguising identity or issuing a false invoice trigger 50 percent penalties with joint liability of the professional customer in some patterns. On the commercial side, any breach of the invoicing duties in Article L. 441-9 exposes the company to an administrative fine of up to 75,000 euros for an individual and 375,000 euros for a legal entity, doubled on repeat within two years of the first final sanction decision. The DGCCRF (Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes, the competition and consumer enforcement authority) controls these details during inspections and reads the structured fields directly, so a template missing the due date, the penalty rate, the recovery fee or the order number is not a clerical detail but a sanctionable file. From abroad, the practical shield is a pre-issue validation: block any invoice that lacks SIREN, VAT numbers, sequential number, issue date, service date, full price breakdown, VAT per rate, due date, penalty rate, recovery fee and order reference, and require a second pair of eyes for the first twenty invoices after the platform switch. Fifty euros per invoice looks small until it multiplies across a year of monthly subscriptions issued outside the circuit.

Retention and accounting duties close the loop, and they surprise founders who assume the platform keeps everything. Commercial documents must be kept for ten years: Article L. 123-22 of the Commercial Code provides that “Les documents comptables et les pièces justificatives sont conservés pendant dix ans.” VAT taxpayers have parallel duties under Article 286 of the CGI, including keeping a “livre aux pages numérotées sur lequel elle inscrit, jour par jour, sans blanc ni rature, le montant de chacune de ses opérations” where relevant, and producing justifications at the main establishment and at branches on request. The platform is a transmission channel, not your archive unless the contract says so with the required guarantees; download and archive the structured originals and the status logs in a durable format, keep the mapping between platform identifiers and accounting entries, and ensure the archive is accessible to the French entity even if you change platform or close the foreign head-office server. Cash-register or invoicing software used for sales without invoices must meet inalterability, security, conservation and archiving conditions attested by certificate or by the publisher attestation, a point that matters for retail subsidiaries that combine shop sales and business-to-business invoices. When the auditor asks, from Paris or by correspondence, for the invoice, its statuses, and the contract behind it, the company that answers within days with a complete chain looks organised, while the company that answers that “the platform has it” looks absent.

Corrections follow one rule: never rewrite history. If the price, quantity, VAT rate or identity is wrong, issue a credit note through the same platform that refers specifically and unambiguously to the initial invoice, then re-issue a correct invoice where needed. The tax code treats any document that amends the initial invoice and refers to it specifically as an invoice subject to the same details, so the credit note must carry the full identification and the reference, not a bare “cancel invoice 2026-014”. Keep the original visible in the chain; deleting or editing it breaks the audit trail the administration now reads automatically. If the error is a missing mandatory detail discovered before sending, correct before transmission, because the platform validation may catch it and the 15-euro omission fine never arises. If the error is discovered after the customer paid, still correct through a credit note, because the customer’s VAT deduction depends on a compliant invoice and an uncorrected error migrates the risk to the customer, who will come back to you. Diary a monthly reconciliation from abroad: invoices issued in accounting versus invoices transmitted on the platform versus invoices reported, and separately invoices received on the platform versus invoices booked. The gap between those four numbers is where fines grow.

For the director who lives abroad, the operating routine that prevents most sanctions fits on one page. Designate the approved platform and the compatible software, register in the directory, lock a bilingual template with all French mandatory details, assign a weekly reviewer with a substitute, reconcile monthly, archive originals plus status logs for ten years, and diary the 2026 and 2027 milestones with your accountant. Treat any administration letter about the platform as urgent and answer within days, not at the next board meeting. Keep the contract, the delivery proofs and the platform logs together per customer, because that bundle is what proves the debt under Articles L. 110-3 and 1353 and what carries the penalty computation under Article L. 441-10. The reform does not ask a foreign founder to move to France; it asks the French company to receive, issue and keep invoices through a traceable circuit that works the same whether the director opens it from Paris or from another continent. Companies that set the circuit up in September 2026 spend the following months collecting faster; companies that keep emailing PDFs spend them explaining the backlog to their accountant and, sometimes, to the administration.

Conclusion

Your French company must receive electronic invoices since 1 September 2026 whatever its size, and must issue them electronically already if it is large or intermediate-sized, otherwise from 1 September 2027, in each case through an approved platform in Factur-X, UBL or CII with the full mandatory details. The invoice must identify both parties with SIREN and VAT numbers, describe and price the supply per VAT rate, and state the due date, the ECB-plus-ten penalty rate payable without reminder, the 40-euro recovery fee and the order number. Late penalties accrue automatically, the two Cour de cassation decisions cited confirm their scope between professionals, and proof rests on the contract plus the platform timestamp, not on the invoice alone. Breaches cost 50 euros per invoice outside the electronic circuit within an annual cap, 15 euros per omitted detail, and up to 375,000 euros for commercial invoicing breaches, with a formal-notice track for missing reception via an approved platform. Set the platform, lock the template, review weekly, reconcile monthly and archive for ten years, and the reform becomes a collection tool rather than a fine generator.