In short
- On 1 September 2026, every company established in France must be able to receive an electronic invoice. No size exemption. It is the one date that concerns absolutely everybody.
- Issuing comes later for you. Large companies and mid-caps from 1 September 2026, small and micro businesses from 1 September 2027. The proposed postponement to 2028 was rejected in April 2025.
- The public portal no longer routes anything. Since the texts of 27 July 2026 it holds the central directory and collects data. Invoices travel through an approved platform that you choose.
- If you sell to consumers, your subject is not the invoice, it is e-reporting. They are two different obligations, and many shops only prepare for the wrong one.
Ask ten online retailers: nine will answer 2027. That is the date they remember, and it is correct for the part that concerns them most visibly, issuing their own invoices.
Except that another date comes first, allows no exemption by company size, and often slips under the radar: on 1 September 2026, every company established in France must be able to receive an electronic invoice. A three-person business as much as a group.
The reason is mechanical. On that same date, large companies and mid-caps start issuing in electronic format. Your suppliers, your carriers, your advertising providers, your host: if they fall into that category, their invoices will reach you in that format whether you are ready or not.
If your company is not established in France The invoicing obligation covers transactions between companies established in France. A foreign seller with no French establishment is not required to issue French electronic invoices. But if you hold a French establishment, or a French VAT registration with local operations, the question deserves a precise answer from your advisers rather than an assumption. The rest of this article describes the framework as it applies in France.
What the reform asks, in three ideas
The subject has a reputation for complexity. It comes down to three mechanisms, and the rest is calendar.
- An electronic invoice is not a PDF. A PDF sent by email remains a paper document as far as the reform is concerned. An electronic invoice is a structured file, machine readable, in one of the accepted formats. Factur-X is the most widespread in France because it combines both: a PDF you read with your eyes, and structured data embedded inside that your customer’s system reads on its own.
- It no longer travels directly. You can no longer email your invoice to a business customer. It passes through an approved platform, which each party chooses on their own side. That is the most structural plumbing change.
- The tax authority receives data along the way. This is the point most articles treat last and the one that concerns online shops most. We come to it below.
The most common mistake Believing that being a small business pushes everything to 2027. The 2027 date concerns issuing your invoices. Receiving applies to every company from 1 September 2026. A shop that has not chosen a platform by then will not properly receive invoices from its larger suppliers, with the consequences that carries for VAT recovery and for the accounts.
The calendar, as it stands today
| Date | Who is concerned | What becomes mandatory |
|---|---|---|
| 1 September 2026 | Every company, with no size condition | Being able to receive an electronic invoice |
| 1 September 2026 | Large companies and mid-caps | Issuing in electronic format, and transmitting e-reporting data |
| 1 September 2027 | Small, very small and micro businesses | Issuing in electronic format, and transmitting e-reporting data |
This calendar has already moved several times since 2023, and it could move again. That is precisely why we advise dealing first with what does not depend on it: receiving, which comes first, and cleaning up your invoicing data, which will be needed either way.
A change many people missed: the public portal no longer routes anything
For two years the project rested on the idea that a company could route invoices for free through the public invoicing portal. That is no longer the case.
The texts of 27 July 2026 settled two things. The terminology changed first: the official term is now approved platform. More importantly, the role of the public portal changed: it no longer handles issuing or receiving invoices. It holds the central directory that says where an invoice should be addressed, and it collects the data intended for the tax authority.
The practical consequence is direct: choosing an approved platform is no longer optional, it is the only route, for receiving as much as for issuing. And it is a decision that commits you, because it plugs into your shop, your accounting and your management software.
The point that changes everything for an online shop
Here is what most general articles handle badly, and what decides the shape of your project.
Electronic invoicing only covers transactions between companies established in France. If your shop sells to consumers, your sales do not fall under electronic invoicing. They fall under e-reporting: transmitting transaction data to the tax authority, with no invoice.
| What you sell | What it falls under | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| To a consumer in France | Transaction e-reporting | Transmit your sales data periodically, with no electronic invoice to issue |
| To a business established in France | Electronic invoice | Issue through an approved platform, in a structured format |
| To a customer outside France, business or consumer | Transaction e-reporting | Transmit the data, the invoice itself staying outside the scheme |
| Your purchases from French suppliers | Receiving electronic invoices | This is the 1 September 2026 obligation, the one that comes first |
The trap sits there: a shop selling mostly to consumers can rightly conclude that electronic invoicing barely concerns it. And wrongly conclude that it has nothing to do. E-reporting assumes your sales data is clean, complete and exportable, which is rarely true in an older catalogue.
The method: four workstreams, in this order
- Receive before you issue. Choose your approved platform and wire up receiving. It is the nearest deadline, and also the cheapest: receiving is simpler than issuing.
- Clean your invoicing data. Your business customers’ company registration number, their intra-community VAT number, the exact billing address. These fields are often optional in a shop, badly filled, or entered as free text. An electronic invoice with a wrong recipient identifier does not arrive, and you do not always find out.
- Qualify your flows. Take the table above and classify your real sales: share of consumers, share of French businesses, share of exports. That ratio decides whether your main workstream is invoicing or e-reporting.
- Wire up issuing, once the rest holds. It is the part everyone looks at first, and the one best done last, when the data is clean and the platform chosen.
An immediate self-diagnosis, with no tool: export a hundred business orders from your shop and count those where the customer’s company registration number is present and correctly formed. If the rate is below ninety percent, you have found your priority workstream, and it is not a technical one.
The possible approaches, and what they are worth
| Approach | What it gives you | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Going through your accountant | The easiest decision, and often the first instinct. But the flow starts from their platform, not your shop: the invoice is issued after the fact, and automation stops at the door of your system | Low volume of business invoices, accounting already outsourced |
| The approved platform alone | Compliant and independent. But entry or import stays manual if nothing links it to your shop, which recreates work on every order | Services businesses, few orders, no catalogue |
| The shop connected to the platform | The order becomes a compliant invoice with no re-keying, and incoming invoices file themselves. Requires an integration and clean data upstream | Shops with a steady volume of business customers |
| Waiting for 2027 | Does not solve receiving, which is due on 1 September 2026. And concentrates all the work into a period when providers will be saturated | No case we recommend |
Tooling: what plugs into the shop
Choosing the approved platform is yours to make, and it rests on criteria that are not technical: how durable the provider is, its pricing by volume, its ability to talk to your accountant. We do not recommend one platform in particular, and be wary of anyone who does without looking at your flows.
What plugs in on the shop side, on the other hand, is our trade. We deploy for our clients the modules published by Datafirefly Limited, the sister company of our agency: the Factur-X module to turn an order into an invoice in the expected structured format, and the e-reporting module to prepare the transmission of transaction data, which is the real subject for shops selling to consumers.
The method comes before the tool, and here it is almost self-evident: no module recovers missing registration numbers or approximate billing addresses. Cleaning the data comes before installing anything, always.
What this says about something bigger
This reform is experienced as an administrative constraint, and it is one. But it produces a side effect we see in every client who started early: it forces order onto data nobody was looking at.
A customer file with clean business identifiers, normalised billing addresses, sales flows qualified by customer type and by country: that is exactly the material later missing when you want to segment, to analyse margin by segment, or to build a customer base that belongs to you. The regulatory constraint funds work you would have had to do anyway.
FAQ
We are a small business, are we really concerned from September 2026?
Yes, for receiving. The obligation to receive electronic invoices applies to every company established in France from 1 September 2026, with no size condition. It is the obligation to issue that moves to 1 September 2027 for small, very small and micro businesses.
Is a PDF sent by email enough?
No. As far as the reform is concerned, a plain PDF is equivalent to paper. An electronic invoice is a structured file, machine readable, sent through an approved platform. Factur-X answers both needs: a PDF readable by eye, with the structured data embedded inside it.
Our shop sells mostly to consumers, are we concerned?
Not by electronic invoicing, which only covers transactions between companies established in France. But yes by e-reporting, which requires transmitting your transaction data. And yes by receiving, for your own suppliers’ invoices. So two obligations out of three apply to you.
Could the calendar still be postponed?
It has already moved several times, and an amendment of March 2025 proposed moving small businesses to 2028 before being rejected in April 2025. Betting on a postponement is a gamble, and it changes nothing about the September 2026 receiving deadline. The data clean-up will be needed whatever the date.
Can Dotsland help?
Yes. Qualifying your sales flows, auditing your invoicing data, choosing and wiring the approved platform into your shop, and setting up e-reporting. It is one workstream of our e-commerce and marketplaces expertise. Let’s talk, or start with the self-diagnosis above: counting valid registration numbers on a hundred business orders takes an hour and says a great deal.