French e-invoicing 2026-2027: PDP, e-reporting and mandate guide

French e-invoicing 2026-2027: PDP, e-reporting and mandate guide#

French e-invoicing is not a PDF reform. From 2026-2027, French VAT-taxable businesses must receive, issue and transmit invoice and transaction data through structured channels. The former PDP vocabulary is still widely used, while official communication increasingly refers to approved platforms. Dematerialisation operators, or OD, do not necessarily have the same legal role.

This guide is for SMEs, startups, e-commerce businesses, restaurants, construction companies and foreign founders operating in France. It supports our e-invoicing service and finance digital transformation service.

All businesses must be able to receive e-invoices from 1 September 2026. Large and mid-sized companies must issue e-invoices from 1 September 2026. SMEs and micro-businesses must issue from 1 September 2027.

A compliant e-invoice is not a simple PDF by email. It must use an accepted electronic structure, include mandatory data fields and be transmitted through the required circuit. This affects sales, purchases, accounting, VAT and internal approval workflows.

In concrete terms, every business shares one common deadline to prepare before 1 September 2026: reception. To see where you stand, our e-invoicing readiness test reviews your situation in a few minutes, and the checklist below breaks down the four tasks to complete.

What a delay costs. Missing these deadlines carries penalties, with two separate fines:

• Failure to issue an invoice in electronic form: 50 € per invoice, capped at 15,000 € per calendar year (Article 1737 III of the French Tax Code).
• Failure to transmit e-reporting data: 250 € per missing transmission, within the same 15,000 € annual cap per business (Article 1788 D of the French Tax Code).

A tolerance applies: a first breach over the current year and the three previous years is not penalised if it is corrected spontaneously, or within thirty days of a first request from the tax authorities.

An approved platform is registered by the French tax authorities and performs the regulatory functions: issuing, transmitting, receiving, extracting and sending required data. An OD may prepare, convert or interface data, but it does not necessarily replace an approved platform. Ask every provider: are you an approved platform or connected to one, which flows do you cover, and how does the accountant access data?

In practice, choosing an approved platform comes down to a few concrete criteria, once the official vocabulary is clear.

Since July 2025, the former partner dematerialisation platforms (PDP) have officially been called approved platforms; the PDP acronym is still common. The public invoicing portal, once considered as a free exchange platform, has been refocused on the central recipient directory and the e-reporting data hub: there is therefore no free public portal for issuing invoices, and using a registered private approved platform is mandatory. More than 130 platforms were registered by the French tax authorities in June 2026, and the list that prevails is published on impots.gouv.fr.

Four criteria guide the choice:

• Software compatibility: does the platform connect with your invoicing tool, point-of-sale, ERP and accounting system?
• Cost: what is the price per invoice issued, received or by volume, and which options are billed on top?
• E-reporting included: does the platform also transmit B2C sales and international transaction data, or only B2B invoices?
• Formats covered: does it handle the Factur-X, UBL and CII base compliant with the European standard EN 16931?

You can select one or several approved platforms, and even different platforms for issuing, receiving and e-reporting; a non-registered provider can stay in the loop as a compatible solution as long as it is connected to at least one approved platform.

E-reporting covers certain transaction and payment data outside the domestic B2B e-invoicing flow. Sales to private customers (B2C) and international or intra-EU operations are its core: they generate no e-invoice inside the circuit, but their data must still be reported. Unlike invoices, this data is not sent in real time: its frequency depends on the VAT regime, for example every two months under the basic exemption and monthly under the simplified actual regime. A point often missed: the e-reporting obligation follows the issuing timetable, not the reception one. An SME is therefore only subject to it from 1 September 2027, whereas large and mid-sized companies are from 1 September 2026.

The underestimated risk is not only choosing a platform too late. It is believing that the reform is limited to issuing customer invoices. Supplier invoice reception, lifecycle statuses, rejections, directories, mandatory data, mandates and e-reporting change the finance operating model.

Most SMEs treat e-invoicing as a software purchase and stop there. In practice, getting ready is a finance project with a sequence, and the work that matters happens before any tool is switched on. A structured 90-day approach lets a small team prepare without disrupting current billing, and it spreads the effort so that data cleaning and testing do not collide with a month-end close.

The first weeks are about mapping, not buying. Start by listing your customers and suppliers and sorting them by country and by B2B versus B2C, because that split decides where each flow goes: a domestic B2B sale runs through the e-invoicing circuit, while B2C and certain international operations fall under e-reporting instead. Next, inventory every tool that touches a transaction: invoicing software, point-of-sale, ERP, accounting system and bank connection. Many SMEs discover at this stage that an invoice can originate in three different places, which is exactly the kind of overlap that produces duplicates and rejected flows later.

Only once the map is clear should you choose the circuit, an approved platform or a connected tool wired into one. Then comes the least glamorous and most decisive task: cleaning the master data. SIREN, SIRET, postal addresses, intra-community VAT numbers, payment methods and order references all have to be consistent, because a compliant tool will not repair a database full of gaps. Reserve the final weeks for live testing of issuing, reception, lifecycle statuses and rejections, and for training the people who will run the process day to day.

Not every business profile has the same priorities. Here are three typical situations and the first move to make; if in doubt, our chartered accounting firm in Paris 8 can frame your connection.

The word missing from most readiness checklists is mandate. When you let a platform, an accountant or another operator issue or transmit invoices on your behalf, that delegation has to be documented, with the boundaries of who does what made explicit. A mandate is not a formality: it decides who is accountable when a flow is rejected, who corrects it and who keeps control of the underlying data. Leaving this implicit is one of the most common gaps we see, and it surfaces precisely when something goes wrong.

Around that question sit the operational decisions the reform really forces, and none of them are answered by the brand of software you pick. Who issues the invoices, and who validates them before they leave? Where do supplier invoices land, and who handles rejections and lifecycle statuses? How are transaction and payment data transmitted for the operations that fall under e-reporting? And, just as practically, how does your accountant retrieve the documents and data needed to keep the books?

Treating the reform as an internal-control project, rather than a tool migration, is what turns it into an advantage. Done properly, it can shorten processing times, improve data quality and sharpen cash-flow monitoring, but only if responsibilities are written down rather than assumed. The goal is not to run the best-known platform. It is to move the right invoice, in the right format, carrying the right data, to the right person, with a clear mandate behind every step.

Data quality is the second risk. A compliant tool will not repair a customer or supplier database full of duplicates. The reform will expose weaknesses that were previously absorbed manually.