What non-French suppliers must do before 1 September 2026
Good news up front: if you invoice French businesses from outside France, this reform changes how your invoices arrive, not whether you get paid — as long as you do a small amount of work with each customer before the date. This page is the whole picture, in one place, in plain English.
How the reform reaches you at all
Start with the part that is in your favour. The French statutory obligation sits on businesses established in France: the reform covers domestic B2B transactions where both parties are French-established taxable persons. If you have no French establishment, you are generally outside the obligation to issue through a French platform, and no French rule says you have to go and buy one.
What does reach you is the other side of the same reform. From 1 September 2026, every VAT-registered business established in France must be able to receive electronic invoices, through an approved platform — a Plateforme Agréée (PA), the term that replaced "PDP". Picture the platform as your customer's new front door: it takes the structured invoice, validates it, and delivers it into their accounts-payable system. A PDF emailed to an inbox has no way in.
There is a second reason your customer will push on this. They have reporting duties on cross-border purchases — French e-reporting covers the flows outside the domestic e-invoicing scope, which is exactly where a sale from you lands. So they want your invoice data structured and identifiable for their own sake too. That is usually why the request arrives from their tax team rather than their AP team.
One exception to check with your adviser: if you have a French branch or fixed establishment and the sale is attached to it, you can be inside the domestic obligation like any French business. "Not established in France" is a question about your structure, not about what your head office letterhead says.
What to do before the date
Six steps, and none of them is technical. Work down the list one customer at a time.
- List your French customers. You only need to act on the ones you actually invoice — and for most non-French suppliers that is a surprisingly short list. Start there.
- Find each one's SIREN and check the directory. Search them by name here to get the 9-digit SIREN, then check the official French directory (l'annuaire) for an attached approved platform and the routing level. The directory is French-only and CAPTCHA-protected, so we translate every line you will see there.
- Ask the five questions — platform, routing address and level, format, a test invoice, and a rejection contact. The wording is on the homepage, free to copy. One email per customer and you are most of the way there.
- Work out how you will produce the format they want. Factur-X, UBL and CII are the three the French platforms are built around, and the format explainer covers which is which. Check what you already send first: if you issue UBL or Peppol BIS for other European customers, you may need no new format at all.
- Run one test invoice. This is the step that saves you. A single dry run before September catches routing mistakes while they are still cheap: a wrong SIRET is a five-minute fix in August and a three-week payment delay in October.
- Save what you learn onto the customer record. SIREN, routing level, routing code if there is one, platform name, agreed format. You will need all five every single time you invoice them, so write them down once and stop re-finding them.
What you are not required to do
This list is probably shorter than you have been told. Four things you can cross off right now:
- You do not have to register with a French platform just because you sell into France. Whether it is worth doing is a commercial call about how many French customers you have and how they want to receive — not a legal requirement.
- You do not need a SIREN of your own to invoice a French customer. The SIREN you need is theirs, for routing.
- You do not have to throw out your invoicing system. What changes is the file you hand over and the route it travels — not your accounting.
- You do not have to use Factur-X specifically. It is the most-talked-about French format, not the only accepted one. Your customer's platform decides, so ask before you build.
A word of caution: be sceptical of anyone selling you a French compliance product on the claim that a foreign supplier is legally obliged to issue through a French platform. The commercial pressure is real. The statutory duty, for a business with no French establishment, generally is not.
The dates that matter to you
Only the first one changes anything for you as a non-French supplier. The second is still worth knowing, because it explains why some of your customers sound relaxed and others sound panicked.
- 1 September 2026 — every French VAT-registered business must be able to receive e-invoices, no size test. Large and mid-size French companies must also start issuing.
- 1 September 2027 — French SMEs, micro-businesses and the self-employed must start issuing too.
So if a small French customer tells you they have until 2027, they are half right — their issuing duty is a year away, but their receive duty starts on the same day as everyone else's. Your invoice still has to arrive through their platform. See the full timeline, with days remaining.
If an invoice has already been rejected
You are not late. You are early to a problem everyone else is about to hit. There is a whole page for this: my French client rejected my PDF invoice — what now? It covers the interim routes AP teams are using right now to get current invoices paid while the permanent connection gets agreed.
As always, this is a description of a regulation and not tax or legal advice. Scope questions — especially whether you have a French establishment — belong with your own adviser.
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Frequently asked questions
Do non-French suppliers have to issue French e-invoices?
Generally no — and that is worth hearing clearly. The French obligation to issue electronic invoices applies to businesses established in France, and the reform covers domestic B2B transactions between French-established taxable persons. A supplier with no French establishment sits outside it. What does affect you is your customer's obligation to receive through an approved platform from 1 September 2026, because that decides whether your invoice lands.
Do I need a French platform to invoice a French company?
Probably not. What you need is to deliver a structured invoice to your customer's platform in a format it accepts. That can come from your own provider, over Peppol where their platform supports it, or through a French approved platform if you decide one is worth the money. Ask the customer which routes their platform offers before you buy anything at all.
What happens if I keep emailing PDF invoices after September?
Legally, nothing happens to you — the French issuing obligation is not yours. Commercially is another story: expect returned or ignored invoices and slower payment, because your customer's accounts-payable process now runs through their platform and an emailed PDF has no way into it. It is your cash flow that pays for the delay, not theirs.
Does my French customer need my VAT number differently now?
Your VAT number is still required content on the invoice, and it is worth confirming it validates in VIES, the EU VAT number checking service, before you start sending structured invoices. The new thing is the routing identifier: French e-invoices are addressed to your customer's SIREN or SIRET, not to an email address.
When should I start?
Now, if you have not already. The work itself is small — a short email and one test invoice per customer — but it depends on a reply from their finance team, and those replies get slower every week as September approaches. Doing this in August costs you an hour. Doing it in October costs you a payment cycle.