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France Live

France is rolling out mandatory business-to-business e-invoicing, delivered over the Peppol network, alongside a separate obligation to periodically report transaction and payment data to the French tax authority for everything that domestic e-invoicing doesn't already cover — cross-border trade, B2C sales, and payment timing. If you invoice French counterparties, you'll eventually need to do both: exchange structured invoices domestically, and keep your tax-authority reporting current.

The mandate at a glance

  • Every French business must eventually be able to receive and issue structured invoices via an approved platform. The rollout is staged by company size.
  • September 2026: all businesses must be able to receive invoices this way; large and mid-size enterprises must also issue invoices and start tax-authority reporting.
  • September 2027: all remaining businesses, including SMEs and micro-enterprises, must issue invoices this way too.
  • The regulatory model has two parts: domestic B2B invoices move directly between certified platforms over Peppol; separately, a periodic batch of aggregated data (covering international trade and B2C sales) is reported to the French tax data hub, run on behalf of the tax authority.

How it works

  • Domestic invoices are exchanged as structured UBL, CII, or Factur-X documents over Peppol AS4.
  • Tax-authority reporting runs on a cadence set by your VAT regime and uses a separate government reporting channel — it isn't carried over the same Peppol connection as your invoices.
  • Domestic French exchanges (FR-to-FR) get lifecycle confirmation via the French CDAR status document — Déposée, Reçue par la plateforme, Mise à disposition, or Rejetée — instead of Peppol MLS. Non-domestic exchanges continue to use standard Peppol MLS delivery confirmation.

Onboarding a French participant

  • French participants use Peppol scheme 0225, based on your 9-digit SIREN (with optional SIRET or routing-code suffixes). The SIREN is Luhn-validated, and the participant must be created on a France-jurisdiction access point and SMP.
  • A French participant isn't active immediately. It's created as PENDING_MANDATE, moves to PENDING_TAX_REGISTRATION once KYC is approved, and becomes ACTIVE once registered in the French government directory (the Annuaire). Until then it is still being onboarded.
  • KYC is mandatory: you give your SIREN and SIRET, upload a signed mandate that designates Arratech as your platform together with proof of legal identity (such as a KBIS extract), and an admin of your organisation approves it. Approval triggers registration in the Annuaire.
  • Once active, the document types of the French regulated process (Factur-X, the UBL and CII France CIUS and EXTENDED-CTC-FR variants, Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 and the CDAR status document) are registered automatically. These can't be removed.
  • You can check registration progress via the participant's Local Registrar data, which shows Annuaire registration status and confirmation reference.
  • The steps in detail, including what to upload and who approves, are on France: onboarding and KYC.

Sending to French recipients

  • Before delivering a document sent under the French regulated process to a French recipient, Arratech checks that the recipient is registered in the French Annuaire with a platform attached. This check applies to every sender, regardless of their own jurisdiction, and only to regulated-process traffic. Standard cross-border Peppol invoices are not subject to it.
  • If the recipient is not registered, or has no platform attached yet, the submission is rejected and nothing is sent. If the directory check itself can't be completed, the submission fails with a retryable error. The rules and error codes are in Sending to France.

Cross-border invoicing

  • The French e-invoicing mandate covers domestic B2B invoicing between French-established businesses. A foreign supplier invoicing a French customer is not subject to it — the invoice travels over standard international Peppol (for example Peppol BIS Billing 3.0), with no French-specific formats, no certified-platform involvement on the sender side, and no Annuaire lookup.
  • France effectively runs two Peppol lanes: the regulated domestic lane (French formats, CDAR lifecycle statuses, Annuaire routing) and the standard international lane (standard Peppol processes and formats, MLS delivery confirmation). Cross-border traffic uses the international lane.
  • A French business receiving both domestic and international invoices needs receiving capabilities in both lanes: its regulated French registration and a standard Peppol registration.
  • Cross-border transactions still count toward the French customer's e-reporting obligation. The customer's platform reports them to the tax authority, and with Arratech you submit them as events through the API and Arratech files the report. This happens entirely on the French side. The foreign supplier is not involved. See France: e-reporting.

What Arratech handles for you

  • Peppol Access Point and directory (SMP) registration under your organisation's SIREN, so you can send and receive invoices with any Peppol-connected French counterparty.
  • Validation of your documents against the required formats before they're sent.
  • Delivery tracking, so you can see the status of every invoice you send.
  • Accredited platform (Plateforme Agréée): Arratech is an accredited platform and registers your participants in the French Annuaire for you.
  • E-reporting: you submit your cross-border and B2C transactions to Arratech as events through the API, and Arratech works out the periods, adds them up and files the report with the tax authority. Domestic French invoices sent through Arratech are reported automatically, so you submit nothing for them. Deriving these events automatically from invoices already sent through Arratech is not available yet. See France: e-reporting.

Getting set up

  1. Create your Arratech account and organisation — Getting Started, Create an Organisation.
  2. Register as a participant using your SIREN-based identifier — Create a Participant.
  3. Send invoices in a supported French format — Send a Transaction.
  4. Add a webhook so you're notified of delivery events as they happen — Add a Webhook.
  5. Confirm each invoice's delivery status — Verify delivery with MLS. For domestic French exchanges, lifecycle status comes via CDAR instead — see Onboarding a French participant above.