Since 1 September 2026, your company must be able to receive an electronic invoice. Either it can or it cannot — there is no halfway, and no grace period has been announced.
What misleads people is what comes next. Many SME directors heard their accountant say "we are ready", and concluded the matter was closed. It is not. E-invoicing rolls out in stages, and the stage that affects most SMEs has not happened yet: it falls on 1 September 2027.
Eleven months is not long for a project that touches your invoicing, your accounting and your customers at the same time. At doo.FINANCE we have been guiding French SMEs through it since the timetable was announced — and the question that comes up most often is not a technical one. It is "what do I have to do, and in what order?"
Two obligations, and why they get confused
The reform creates two distinct obligations, on two different timetables. That is the source of almost all the confusion.
Receiving. Since 1 September 2026, every VAT-registered business must be able to receive invoices electronically, through an approved platform (plateforme agréée). This obligation has no staging: it applies to everyone, from the sole trader to the large group, from the same date.
Issuing. Here the timetable is progressive:
- large companies and mid-caps (over 250 employees) have been issuing electronically since 1 September 2026;
- SMEs, small businesses and micro-enterprises have until 1 September 2027.
In other words: if you run an SME, you are already receiving electronic invoices from your larger suppliers, and you may lawfully carry on issuing yours as before — until next summer.
The confusion arises because both obligations share one building block: the approved platform. You do not receive an electronic invoice in your inbox, and you will not issue one as a PDF attachment. Everything goes through a platform registered with the tax authority.
"My accountant has a platform" does not cover you
This is the most expensive misunderstanding, and it deserves to be said plainly.
At its general assembly in early September 2026, the Conseil national de l'ordre des experts-comptables — the French professional body for chartered accountants — gave a first assessment of the rollout. According to the professional press, around two thirds of the businesses in the core target group — 66% — are said to have already chosen their approved platform, while the accountancy profession itself reports being very largely ready.
Take that figure for what it is: a statement by a professional body, reported by a media outlet, at a point in time. It is not an official statistic, and we will not present it as one. But the gap it describes — practices ahead, businesses behind — matches what we see in the field.
And it points to a precise blind spot: your practice's choice of platform is not yours. Your accountant has equipped themselves to handle their clients' flows; that does not create your connection, does not register your receiving address in the directory, and does not prepare your invoicing system to issue. These are three separate steps, and two of them are yours.
What to check this week
Before talking about tooling, make sure the part that is already mandatory is genuinely in place. Three checks, in this order:
- Is a platform attached to your company? Not "my accountant has one" — you. If you cannot answer, the answer is probably no.
- Is your receiving address listed in the directory? The e-invoicing directory is how your suppliers know where to send their invoices. A business missing from it receives badly, or not at all.
- Are your supplier invoices already arriving electronically? If your larger suppliers have been issuing since September 2026 and nothing has changed in your bookkeeping, something is not working — and nobody will tell you.
These three points concern the obligation that is already in force. If they are unresolved, the 2027 project can wait.
The mandatory invoice fields have changed too
Often overlooked: the reform adds new mandatory fields to invoices. They are not decorative — an incomplete invoice can be rejected by the recipient's platform, which means an invoice that does not get paid.
It is the kind of detail that costs nothing to handle upfront, and blocks an entire collections chain when you discover it in production.
Eleven months to be able to issue: where to start
1 September 2027 feels distant. It is not, for a simple reason: electronic issuing is not a module you switch on, it is a chain that has to be clean end to end.
Your customer data first. An electronic invoice is rejected if the recipient's SIREN number is wrong, if their receiving address is unknown, or if a mandatory field is missing. A loosely maintained customer file, which worked perfectly well with PDFs sent by email, becomes a rejection generator. This is the longest piece of work, and the one everyone underestimates.
Your invoicing tool next. It must produce a compliant structured format and talk to an approved platform. If you invoice from a spreadsheet, or from software that has not announced its roadmap, now is the time to raise it — not in August 2027.
E-reporting last. For transactions that do not go through business-to-business invoicing — sales to consumers, cross-border transactions — you will have to transmit transaction data to the tax authority. This strand follows the same timetable as issuing for small businesses and SMEs, and it is regularly left out of compliance plans.
If you already work in an ERP
If your accounting and your invoicing live in the same system, you have a real advantage: customer data sits in the same place as the invoice, and the flow to the platform starts from a single source. That is precisely the point of keeping invoicing inside your ERP rather than in a tool alongside it.
If instead your invoicing is in one tool, your accounting in another and your customer file in a third, the 2027 project will first be a reconciliation project. Better to know that in October 2026 than in June 2027.