You run a French company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore. The service is delivered, the goods are shipped, and then nothing happens: the French client pays at 90 days, at 120 days, or disputes the invoice to buy time. From abroad, you feel powerless. French law is actually one of the most creditor-friendly systems in Europe on this point, provided your paperwork is correct. Everything turns on two texts of the Commercial Code (Code de commerce), a flat-rate fee of 40 euros, and a penalty rate linked to the European Central Bank that runs automatically, without any reminder letter.
This guide explains, for a foreign founder or finance team, what a French business-to-business invoice must contain, which payment deadlines your client can and cannot impose, what late payment automatically costs the debtor, and how you recover the money from abroad, including before the Paris commercial court. French acronyms are explained throughout: CGV (conditions générales de vente, your general terms and conditions), DGCCRF (Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes, the competition and consumer protection authority that fines companies for late payment), Kbis (the official company identity extract issued by the greffe, the registry of the commercial court), and BODACC (the official bulletin where company registrations and court judgments are published). If you are still setting up the company itself, read first our step-by-step guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, and for the tax side of the amounts you collect, our guide to French VAT registration and CA3 returns.
I. What must your French business invoice contain and when must you issue it?
A. What mandatory details turn an invoice into an enforceable payment order?
Every purchase of products or provision of services for a professional activity must be invoiced, and the seller must deliver the invoice as soon as the delivery or service is performed, while the buyer is bound to claim it. That is the starting rule of Article L441-9 of the Commercial Code. The invoice must state the name and address of both parties, the date of the sale or service, the quantity, the precise description, the unit price excluding VAT, any price reduction acquired at the date of the transaction, and the order number when the buyer issued one. Two mentions are decisive for getting paid: Article L441-9 of the Commercial Code provides that “La facture mentionne la date à laquelle le règlement doit intervenir”, meaning the invoice states the date on which payment falls due, and it must also specify the discount terms for early payment, the penalty rate due from the day after that due date, and the amount of the flat-rate recovery fee owed if payment arrives late.
Why does this matter so much? Because the penalty rate and the 40-euro fee only run cleanly when they appear on the invoice or in the payment terms it refers to. A foreign founder who bills on a one-line PDF without a due date, without a penalty clause and without the recovery fee has not lost the legal right to interest, but has made every reminder and every court claim harder, slower and more expensive. Put the full clause on every invoice from day one: payment term, penalty rate by reference to the ECB rate plus ten points, and the 40-euro flat fee plus a reservation for additional documented recovery costs. Your accounting software should lock these fields so no invoice goes out without them.
The sanction for missing or inaccurate invoices is not theoretical. Article L441-9 of the Commercial Code punishes any breach with an administrative fine of up to 75,000 euros for an individual and 375,000 euros for a company, doubled to 150,000 and 750,000 euros for a repeat offence within two years after the first sanction became final. These fines are imposed by the DGCCRF after an audit, and they hit the creditor who invoices badly as well as the debtor who pays late. Foreign groups sometimes assume the French administration will not look at a small subsidiary; in practice invoice audits are one of the most frequent DGCCRF controls, they are document-based, they can be run from your accounting exports, and they do not require the director to be present in France. Keep a copy of every invoice issued, as the same article requires, for the full retention period set by tax law, generally six years, so a 2026 invoice must still be producible in 2032.
Your general terms, the CGV, reinforce the invoice. Article L441-1 of the Commercial Code states that “Les conditions générales de vente comprennent notamment les conditions de règlement”, meaning the general terms include in particular the payment conditions, with the price list and any reductions. Any professional buyer can demand communication of your CGV, on any durable medium, and you must be able to prove you sent them. From abroad, the practical routine is simple: publish the CGV on your website, attach them to every quote and order confirmation, and refer to them on the invoice itself. When the penalty clause sits in both the CGV and the invoice, the debtor cannot credibly claim surprise, and the judge sees a professional creditor who warned in advance.
On the tax side, the invoice must also satisfy VAT invoicing rules. Article 289 of the General Tax Code requires a taxable person to ensure an invoice is issued for supplies to another taxable person or non-taxable legal person, for the transactions that are not exempt, and the detailed content is fixed by regulation. Concretely, alongside the commercial mentions, the invoice shows the VAT identification numbers of seller and buyer for intra-EU supplies, the VAT rate and amount per rate, and where an exemption or reverse charge applies, the legal reference that justifies it. Errors here do not only expose you to the commercial fine; they expose the client to VAT reassessment and give the client a pretext to suspend payment while “the invoice is corrected”. Issue correct invoices once, and you remove the most common excuse for late payment. Our VAT registration and CA3 guide details how the French VAT number, returns and penalties work once you invoice from France.
B. How do electronic invoicing, the order number and record-keeping protect a foreign creditor?
France is moving to generalised electronic invoicing (facturation électronique) between taxable businesses, with certified platforms (plateformes agréées) and a phased timetable. Even before your company falls into a mandatory wave, issuing structured electronic invoices through your accounting tool is strong protection: the issue date is timestamped, delivery is traceable, and the due date computed from it cannot be disputed. When the client says “we never received the invoice”, you produce the platform log. When the client says “the invoice had no due date”, you produce the template with the locked clause. Foreign founders managing from another time zone should insist on this automation, because payment disputes are won on documents, not on phone calls, and a complete digital file compensates for the director not being in Paris.
The purchase order number deserves the same discipline. Where the buyer previously issued an order, the invoice must reproduce its number, and large French buyers use automated three-way matching between order, delivery note and invoice: any mismatch routes the invoice to an exception queue where it can sit for weeks. Ask for the order number on every order confirmation, refuse to start work for large accounts without it, and diarize: if no order arrives within a few days, send a written start-of-work notice restating the price and payment term. That letter later proves the term was agreed when the debtor claims the term was never accepted.
Retention and coherence close the system. Keep each invoice and its supporting documents, contract, order, delivery proof, time sheets for services, for the full tax retention period, in a form the administration can audit remotely. Reconcile monthly: invoices issued, payments received, reminders sent. A creditor who can show a clean chronological file, with CGV communicated, invoice with due date and penalty clause, delivery proof and two dated reminders, obtains payment orders in weeks; a creditor with scattered emails and rebuilt PDFs spends months proving the claim exists. The rest of this guide assumes your invoices are compliant, so that the powerful deadline and penalty rules below apply at full strength.
II. How do you force payment on time and make late payment expensive?
A. Which payment deadlines can your French client legally impose on you?
The headline rule is a ceiling, not a suggestion. Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code provides: “Le délai convenu entre les parties pour régler les sommes dues ne peut dépasser soixante jours après la date d’émission de la facture”, meaning the payment term agreed between the parties cannot exceed sixty days after the invoice date. Unless the contract or the CGV say otherwise, the default is even shorter: thirty days after receipt of the goods or performance of the service. A single agreed alternative exists: a maximum of forty-five days end-of-month after the invoice date, but only if it is expressly stipulated in the contract and is not a manifest abuse towards the creditor. For periodic invoices within the meaning of VAT law, the agreed term cannot exceed forty-five days after the invoice date. Any clause that purports to go beyond these ceilings is unenforceable, and the statutory ceiling replaces it.
Three refinements matter for foreign businesses. First, the verification or acceptance procedure, common in IT, engineering and industrial contracts, is itself capped. Where the contract provides an acceptance procedure to certify conformity, its duration follows commercial good practice and in any event does not exceed thirty days from receipt of the goods or performance of the service, unless expressly stipulated otherwise without constituting an abusive clause or practice, and it can neither extend the maximum payment period nor shift its starting point, under the same conditions, as Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code provides in its paragraph III. A client who imposes a 60-day “validation” followed by 60-day payment is therefore doubling the legal maximum, and the excess is challengeable. Second, sector-specific shorter caps apply, notably for perishable food, meat, fish and certain agricultural products, where the ceiling can fall to thirty days or even less from delivery. Third, export sales paid VAT-free for goods reshipped outside the EU can lawfully extend to ninety days from invoice date under strict conditions. If none of these exceptions covers your case, a 90-day or 120-day term imposed by a French buyer is simply unlawful, and you can claim the statutory penalties from the statutory due date even though the contract says otherwise.
Abuse is policed beyond the ceilings. A 60-day term that is formally compliant can still be sanctioned when the buyer with superior bargaining power imposes conditions that create a significant imbalance, and Article L442-1 of the Commercial Code makes any person who, in the negotiation, conclusion or performance of a contract, obtains or attempts to obtain an advantage without consideration or subjects the other party to obligations creating a significant imbalance, liable for the harm caused. In practice the DGCCRF and the courts look at the whole pattern: systematic 60-day terms imposed on small suppliers with no negotiation, combined with systematic late payment beyond even that term, plus deductions and penalties charged back to the supplier. Document the imbalance early: keep the buyer’s standard purchasing conditions, your requests for shorter terms, and the payment history. That file supports both the administrative complaint and the civil claim.
The administrative stick is heavy. Article L441-16 of the Commercial Code punishes failure to respect the payment deadlines of Articles L441-10, L441-11, L441-12 and L441-13, failure to state the required payment mentions in the payment conditions, and fixing a penalty rate or enforceability conditions that breach Article L441-10, with an administrative fine of up to 75,000 euros for an individual and two million euros for a company. The DGCCRF publishes its sanctions, and publication itself harms the late payer’s reputation with suppliers and lenders. For a foreign creditor, the operational lesson is that a written report to the DGCCRF is a credible lever in negotiation: large French buyers settle quickly when the alternative is an audit of their entire supplier ledger. The DGCCRF route does not replace the court claim for your money, but it changes the balance of power before any hearing.
B. What does late payment automatically cost the debtor and how do you collect from abroad?
From the day after the due date shown on the invoice, three financial consequences run in parallel, and the first two need no reminder. Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code states that “Les pénalités de retard sont exigibles sans qu’un rappel soit nécessaire”, meaning late penalties are due without any reminder being needed. The rate, unless otherwise agreed but never below three times the legal interest rate, is set by the same article: Article L441-10 of the Commercial Code provides that “ce taux est égal au taux d’intérêt appliqué par la Banque centrale européenne à son opération de refinancement la plus récente majoré de 10 points de pourcentage”, meaning the rate equals the ECB most recent refinancing rate plus ten percentage points, with the rate in force on 1 January applying for the first half-year and the rate in force on 1 July for the second half-year. Next, every professional in late payment owes as of right a flat-rate recovery fee fixed by decree, and Article D441-5 of the Commercial Code provides that “Le montant de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement prévue au II de l’article L. 441-10 est fixé à 40 euros”, meaning the flat-rate recovery fee is set at 40 euros. Where documented recovery costs exceed that flat amount, the creditor can claim additional compensation on proof. These penalties and the fee apply as of right; you invoice them, you add them to the reminder, and you claim them in court without first proving any loss.
One boundary must be understood, because it decides how you draft the claim. The commercial late penalty and the civil-law default interest for late payment of money debts are both moratory interest with the same reparatory purpose, so they do not cumulate. The Commercial Chamber of the Court of Cassation held in its judgment of 24 April 2024, appeal No. 22-24.275 that “la pénalité de retard prévue à l’article L. 441-6, I, alinéa 8, du code de commerce, devenu L. 441-10, II, du même code, constitue un intérêt moratoire”, meaning the late penalty under the former Article L441-6, now Article L441-10, II, constitutes moratory interest, and having the same nature it does not cumulate with statutory default interest. The general civil rule remains that Article 1231-6 of the Civil Code provides that “Les dommages et intérêts dus à raison du retard dans le paiement d’une obligation de somme d’argent consistent dans l’intérêt au taux légal, à compter de la mise en demeure”, meaning damages for late payment of a money debt consist of interest at the statutory rate running from the formal demand. The practical consequence is a choice, not a stacking: claim the commercial penalty at ECB plus ten points running automatically from the day after the due date, which is almost always higher than the statutory rate running only from formal demand, and add the 40-euro fee plus documented costs on top. Pleading both rates for the same period invites the judge to reduce the claim and weakens an otherwise strong file.
The same Court of Cassation confirmed how seriously judges take the commercial penalty by correcting a court of appeal that had refused it on a wrong legal basis. In its judgment of 11 February 2026, appeal No. 23-21.177, the Court recalled, on the basis of Article 12 of the Code of Civil Procedure, that “le juge tranche le litige conformément aux règles de droit qui lui sont applicables”, meaning the judge decides the case in accordance with the applicable rules of law, and it applied the former Article L441-6, now Article L441-10, II, to attach ECB-plus-ten-points interest to each invoice from its due date, recalculating principal and interest invoice by invoice. The lesson for a foreign creditor is to present the claim the same way: a schedule listing each invoice, its date, its due date, the half-yearly ECB reference, and the running total. Judges grant what they can verify at a glance.
Collection itself can be run entirely from abroad with a French lawyer. The standard fast track is the injonction de payer, an order-to-pay application filed with the greffe of the competent commercial court, on documents only, without a hearing: invoices, contract or order, delivery proofs, reminders, and the penalty computation. If the debtor does not lodge an objection within one month after service, the order becomes enforceable and a bailiff (commissaire de justice) enforces it against bank accounts and assets. If the debtor objects, the case moves to a full hearing, where your documented file and the automatic penalty regime put you in a strong position. For Paris-based debtors, which covers most large French buyers, the competent court is the Paris court for commercial disputes, now the Tribunal des activités économiques de Paris, sitting in the 1st arrondissement with a dedicated fast-track desk used to foreign claimants, electronic filing by counsel, and bailiffs who serve across Île-de-France within days; build the file in English internally but file in French, with certified translations of any foreign-language contract annex, and allow counsel a power of attorney so no travel is needed. Urgent cases with a risk of asset flight can add a conservatory seizure (saisie conservatoire) on the debtor’s bank account with prior judicial authorisation, and undisputed claims can alternatively go through the simplified debt-recovery declaration procedure for small amounts. Preserve the claim early: Article L110-4 of the Commercial Code provides that obligations arising in the course of trade between merchants, or between merchants and non-merchants, are time-barred after five years unless a shorter special limitation applies, so calendar every invoice and interrupt the period with proceedings or an acknowledged demand rather than informal emails alone.
Negotiation from abroad follows a fixed escalation that experienced creditors repeat invoice after invoice. First, a polite reminder the week after the due date attaching the invoice and stating the penalty rate and 40-euro fee already running. Second, a formal demand (mise en demeure) by registered letter or bailiff, setting a final deadline of eight to fifteen days, quantifying penalties and fee, and warning of the order-to-pay application and a DGCCRF report for unlawful payment terms. Third, filing, and telling the buyer it is filed. Most French debtors pay at stage two, because the penalties visibly grow each month, the DGCCRF risk extends beyond your file to their whole purchasing practice, and an enforceable order threatens their credit rating. Never agree by phone to waive penalties already accrued without consideration: any discount should buy something, such as immediate wire payment of the principal plus part of the penalties, confirmed in writing the same day.
Conclusion
A French invoice with a due date, an ECB-plus-ten-points penalty clause and the 40-euro recovery fee is a collection weapon that works while you sleep abroad, because the penalties run without reminder and the order-to-pay procedure converts documents into enforcement without a hearing when the debtor stays silent. Keep the discipline tight: compliant invoices issued at once, CGV communicated and referenced, payment terms inside the 30-day default or 60-day ceiling with forty-five days end-of-month only where expressly agreed, monthly reconciliation, formal demand before limitation worries arise, and penalty schedules computed invoice by invoice at the correct half-yearly rate. Debtors who discover that delay automatically costs them more than their own bank facility charges them start paying on time, and the one file that goes to the Paris court teaches the whole portfolio. Applied consistently, the French late-payment regime turns distance from a weakness into leverage: the creditor abroad with perfect documents collects faster than the creditor next door with none.