French e-invoicing: are you ready for 1 September 2026?

What actually changes on 1 September 2026

One obligation applies to everyone, and it is the one most often underestimated: from 1 September 2026, every business registered for French VAT must be able to RECEIVE an electronic invoice. No threshold, no size exemption, no transition period. A business that cannot receive is not merely behind on paperwork — its suppliers will be required to issue, and those invoices have to land somewhere.

The obligation to ISSUE depends on size. Large enterprises and mid-sized enterprises are due on the same date, 1 September 2026. SMEs, small and micro businesses have a further year, until 1 September 2027. The categories are those of article 51 of the 2008 economic modernisation act, which the tax authority names as the applicable definition.

A third strand is easy to miss: e-reporting. Transactions outside the scope of e-invoicing — sales to consumers, customers established outside France — are reported separately, on the same timetable as issuing. A business selling mainly to consumers may believe it is safe because it issues few B2B invoices, and find that its main activity is precisely what is caught.

Why France is not a Peppol question

Peppol is a network: each participant registers an address and exchanges structured documents through certified access points. Several European countries adopted it as is — Belgium in particular made it the mandatory channel of its reform. France built something else: a central directory, and state-registered operators known as approved platforms. The older acronym "PDP", still widely used, is no longer the official term.

The consequence is concrete for a group operating on both sides of the border: a Belgian subsidiary and a French one do not prepare in the same way, and a vendor answering "we are on Peppol" has not answered the French question. What matters here is going through an approved platform and being declared in the directory.

Approved platform: what it means, and what it does not

An approved platform is an operator registered by the French tax authority, which publishes and maintains the official list. Two lists coexist, and the difference matters: operators meeting every requirement, and operators registered subject to interoperability tests still under way. Choosing from the second is not forbidden, but it warrants a question about timing.

Your software not appearing on either list does not disqualify it. Many invoicing tools are not themselves approved platforms and were never meant to be: they rely on one. The right question for your vendor is therefore not "are you approved?" but "which approved platform do you route through, and since when?". Odoo, for its part, appears on the list of registered operators.

The directory, and the asymmetry to understand

The e-invoicing directory is public, free and searchable without an account. You look a business up by its SIREN, SIRET, company name or postal address, and read three things: whether it is in scope of the reform, whether it has a receiving platform, and what its electronic invoicing address is.

Here is the point almost nobody anticipates: a business does not register itself in the directory. Its approved platform declares it. So being absent from the directory does not mean "one box left to tick" — it means "no approved platform has declared me". It is the most useful diagnosis available today, and it takes a minute.

What the move really demands, in Odoo as anywhere else

The technical connection is rarely the issue. What takes time is the data underneath: customer records without a valid VAT number, product lines without the tax mapping the structured format requires, journals never configured to retain a structured invoice for the statutory period. An electronic invoice rejected by the platform is not a late invoice: it is an invoice that does not exist.

Which is why the period now opening is less an IT project than an accounting one. A calendar is not caught up by installing software the night before.