France's E-Invoicing Mandate September 2026
Here's What You Need to Know
The days of emailing a PDF invoice to French business partners are numbered. We break down the mandate, the five-corner model, and how to get compliant before the deadline.
If your business handles invoicing with French companies, September 1, 2026 is a date you need to circle in red. France's landmark e-invoicing mandate officially takes effect, and it's far more comprehensive than simply switching from PDFs to digital files. It's a full-scale shift in how tax data is captured, transmitted, and reported — and the window to prepare is closing fast.
To help demystify this, Arratech hosted a live webinar with Thibault Samson, co-founder of The Invoicing Hub and one of France's leading independent experts on the mandate. Here's what every software vendor, ERP provider, and finance team needs to understand.
What the mandate actually requires
At its core, the French mandate makes electronic invoicing compulsory for domestic B2B transactions — meaning any invoice between two French businesses. But the requirements go well beyond that:
E-invoicing replaces PDF, postal, or email invoices for French B2B transactions. Invoices must be transmitted electronically through a certified platform and in one of three mandatory formats: UBL, CII, or Factur-X (a hybrid format combining a human-readable PDF with an embedded XML invoice, similar to Germany's ZUGFeRD).
The invoice life cycle requires both parties to exchange structured status updates throughout the invoice's journey — from "submitted" and "sent by platform," through "approved," "disputed," "suspended," and ultimately "paid." Some statuses are mandatory, others optional, but all require your systems to communicate in a structured XML format.
E-reporting extends the mandate to international B2B transactions and all B2C transactions. Rather than transmitting invoices themselves, companies must send periodic reports of tax-relevant data to the French tax authority (DGFiP). Depending on your VAT regime, this can be required every 10 days, monthly, or bi-monthly.
The deadlines, broken down by company size
Understanding the five-corner model
France has moved away from a centralized platform model (like Italy's SDI) and instead adopted what's effectively a five-corner exchange model. Here's how each party fits together:
Two terms are essential here. The PA (Plateforme Agréée) is a privately certified platform that handles transmission between supplier and buyer, and simultaneously extracts tax data for the government. Using a PA is mandatory you cannot transmit compliant invoices without one.
The PPF (Portail Public de Facturation) is the government's public billing portal. It acts as a data concentrator for all tax extracts and e-reports, and hosts the annuaire a public directory that works just like a Peppol SMP, identifying which PA each company uses. Invoices are exchanged over the Peppol network in one of the three mandated formats. If an invoice fails the PA's technical validation, it is rejected before transmission the tax liability remains with the sender.
The complexity hiding in plain sight: use cases
Beyond the core framework, the mandate defines 44 (and growing) specific "use cases" real business scenarios that require extended invoice formats or special handling. These include factoring arrangements, marketplace transactions, subcontracting, self-billing, insurance payments, deposit invoices, and even employee expense reimbursements.
PAs are not required to support every use case, so it's essential to map which ones apply to your business and confirm your platform covers them. The specifications are published by the AFNOR commission in document XP Z12-014 — and the guidance was updated as recently as February 2026, so staying current matters.
How Arratech makes compliance fast and future-proof
Arratech was built by founders with decades of experience of the Peppol network, including former OpenPeppol leadership. That foundation shapes everything about how our platform works.
We handle the transport layer so you can focus on the invoice payload and your core product. Our infrastructure is scalable to handle any transaction volume, and we partner with a SecNumCloud-certified hosting provider to meet French sovereign cloud requirements.
Not sure if we're the right fit? You can sign up for a free sandbox environment directly on our website and have your technical team test the integration today no sales call or subscription required.
