Lyon: French companies have lived under mandatory e-invoicing since 1 September 2026, when the first phase of the country’s business-to-business reform took effect and every registered firm became legally obliged to receive structured electronic invoices. The tax administration, not Brussels, set that date, and it applies to a machine-tool supplier in the Rhône valley exactly as it applies to a bank on the Champs-Élysées.
The issuing obligation lands in stages. Large enterprises — broadly those above 5,000 employees or 1.5 billion euro in turnover — and mid-caps of between 250 and 5,000 staff must now send invoices in structured form. Small and micro-enterprises get another year, joining on 1 September 2027.
The plumbing matters more than the deadline. Firms cannot simply email a PDF; they route documents through a certified platform, rebranded this year from plateforme de dématialisation partenaire to plateforme agréée, which validates the file and forwards the tax-relevant data to the administration. Accepted formats are Factur-X, UBL and CII, and a public directory maps every company to its chosen platform.
Paris did not build this to tidy up accounts payable. The French treasury wants transaction data close to real time so that it can spot carousel fraud and missing-trader schemes while the money is still moving, and it published the reasoning in an official overview of the reform that frames the exercise as a VAT-collection project first and a digitalisation project second.
That ambition now runs ahead of the Union’s own timetable. Member states adopted the VAT in the Digital Age package in March 2025, and its digital reporting requirements for cross-border business-to-business trade only bite from July 2030, with national systems expected to converge behind a common standard by 2035. France will spend four years operating a domestic regime that the rest of the bloc has not yet matched.
The package did clear one obstacle first. Until ViDA, the VAT Directive required a buyer to consent before a supplier could invoice electronically, which forced capitals to seek derogations before imposing any mandate. Removing that consent rule handed governments the freedom to legislate on their own schedule, and several took it.
Belgium switched on its own B2B e-invoicing obligation at the start of 2026. Germany already forces companies to receive structured invoices and phases in issuing duties across 2027 and 2028. Each capital picked its own architecture, which means a Lyon exporter selling into Antwerp and Stuttgart will soon reconcile three national rulebooks that share a format family but not a governance model.
Enforcement is the open question for the coming months. Tax authorities rarely fine on day one of a reform of this size, and the practical test will be how the administration treats firms whose platform connection fails rather than firms that never connected at all. Trade bodies representing mid-caps spent the summer arguing for a light touch through the first reporting cycles.
The second test arrives next September, when roughly three million smaller businesses join. France has more to prove there than in its boardrooms, and the rest of the Union will read the result closely before writing its own rules for 2030.
