Is your French customer e-invoice ready?
Fourteen checks, in the order you actually do them, before 1 September 2026 — the day every VAT-registered business established in France has to be able to receive electronic invoices. Good news up front: none of this is technical, and the list of French customers you need to work through is usually shorter than you expect. This is the same checklist we email, kept here in full so you never need the form to read it.
Published · Last updated .
How to work through it
Take one customer at a time. Part 1 you can do on your own in a few minutes per customer — look them up here to get the SIREN, then check the official directory. Part 2 is a single email you send them. Part 3 is fifteen minutes of tidying on your own side. Most suppliers finish the whole thing in an afternoon.
Want it as an email you can forward to a colleague, plus a note if the rules change? There is a form at the bottom — but everything it sends is already on this page.
Part 1 — Find out where they stand (you can do all of this alone)
- Confirm the customer is actually in scope The obligation lands on taxable persons established in France, for domestic B2B sales. From 1 September 2026 every VAT-registered business established in France must be able to receive electronic invoices — no size threshold, no phasing. If your customer is a French company you invoice for business, assume they are in.
- Get their 9-digit SIREN Everything downstream is keyed on it. You can search any French company by name and read the SIREN off the result — no French required.
- Get the SIRET of the site you invoice, not just the SIREN A SIREN identifies the legal entity; the 14-digit SIRET identifies the establishment. Larger customers route per site, so the SIRET is often the address your invoice actually needs.
- Look them up in the official directory (l’annuaire) The DGFiP directory tells you whether an approved platform — a Plateforme Agréée (PA), the term that replaced "PDP" — is attached to that company, and at which level invoices should be addressed.
- Note the routing level the directory shows: SIREN, SIRET, or SIRET plus a routing code This is the single most common cause of a delivered-but-lost invoice. Write the level down next to the number; they are not interchangeable.
- Work out which wave they are in, so you can predict the pressure Large companies and ETI must also start issuing on 1 September 2026; SMEs, micro-businesses and the self-employed follow on 1 September 2027. The wave is decided per legal entity on that entity’s own last closed accounts, so treat any published size class as an indicator rather than the legal answer.
Part 2 — Five questions to email the customer
- Which approved platform (PA) do you use? Ask for the platform name in writing so it goes on file. If the directory already showed you one, this is a confirmation rather than a question.
- What is your routing address, and at which level? SIREN, SIRET, or SIRET plus a routing code. Ask them to send the exact string, not a description of it.
- Which format do you want — Factur-X, UBL, CII or Peppol BIS? All four express the same EN 16931 model, and most approved platforms accept several, so there is a fair chance what you already produce is fine.
- Can we run one test invoice first? This is the step that saves you. A wrong SIRET is a five-minute fix before the first live invoice and a three-week payment delay after it.
- Who do we contact if an invoice is rejected? Rejections come back through the platform now rather than as a reply to your email, so get a name before you need one.
Part 3 — Tidy up your own side
- Check what your invoicing system already emits If you send UBL or Peppol BIS to other European customers today, you may need no new format at all. Check before you buy anything — and check that what you emit is actually clean: paste one of your UBL or CII files into attestwire.com/playground and it names the EN 16931 rule, the field and the fix. It runs in your browser, so the invoice is not uploaded. (A Factur-X PDF carries its XML as an attachment inside the PDF; extract that first.)
- Do not assume Chorus Pro covers this Chorus Pro is the route for invoices to French public bodies (B2G) and it hosts the directory you looked your customer up in. It is not the B2B route: for business-to-business invoicing, each company goes through an approved platform. If someone tells you "just send it to Chorus Pro", check which of the two they mean.
- Save the five facts onto the customer record SIREN, SIRET, routing level, routing code if there is one, platform name and agreed format. You need them every time you invoice that customer, so write them down once and stop re-finding them.
Where these facts come from
- impots.gouv.fr — Facturation électronique et plateformes agréées: the obligation to use an approved platform, and the official terminology.
- entreprendre.service-public.gouv.fr — A18759: who must receive from 1 September 2026, and who must issue when.
- economie.gouv.fr — Tout savoir sur la facturation électronique: the ministry’s overview of the reform.
- impots.gouv.fr — the official list of approved platforms: every registered Plateforme Agréée.
- The official directory (l’annuaire): whether a given company has a platform attached, and its routing level.
The obligation is set by article 289 bis of the code général des impôts; the current timetable comes from article 91 of the loi de finances pour 2024 (n° 2023-1322 of 29 December 2023), which postponed a start originally set for 1 September 2024 — so any guidance quoting 2024 or 2025 dates is simply out of date. Registration in the directory is an indicator of readiness, not the legal test. This is a description of a regulation, and not tax or legal advice: where a date has money attached, confirm it with the customer.
Next: the full timeline with days remaining, what non-French suppliers must do, which format is which, what to do if a PDF was already bounced, or the approved-platform list in English.
Want this checklist by email?
Nothing is hidden behind this form — the whole checklist is above, free. Leave your address and we will email you the same list in a form you can forward to a colleague. That is one email. After that we only write if the French rules or the approved-platform register change in a way that actually affects you, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
Here is exactly what happens to your address. We store it — lowercased, with the date you first sent it, the page you sent it from and the country the request came from — in Cloudflare Workers KV, the key-value store this site runs on. We use it to send you this checklist and the occasional update about the French mandate, through Resend, our email provider. No tracking pixels, no open tracking, nothing sold or shared. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link; you can also write to hello@attestwire.com and we will remove you by hand.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to give you my email to get the checklist?
No. The whole checklist is on this page, free, and it always will be. The form exists so you can forward the list to a colleague and hear from us if the rules move — nothing more.
What is a Plateforme Agréée, and is that the same as a PDP?
Same thing, new name. Plateforme Agréée (PA) is the current official term for a DGFiP-approved e-invoicing platform; "PDP" (plateforme de dématérialisation partenaire) is the superseded name you will still see in older articles and in some vendor marketing. If a supplier or customer says PDP, they mean a PA. The full approved list is here, in English.
My customer says "just send it to Chorus Pro" — is that right?
Probably not, and it is worth clearing up now. Chorus Pro is the route for invoices to French public sector bodies, and it hosts the directory you look companies up in. Business-to-business invoicing goes through an approved platform instead. Ask which of the two they mean, and get the platform name and routing address in writing.
What if my customer is not in the directory yet?
It is not a verdict, just a snapshot — plenty of companies register close to the date, and enterprise-level registration does not prove every entity is ready. Send the five questions in Part 2 anyway. If the answer matters commercially, ask them to confirm in writing rather than relying on the directory alone.