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 its own periodic cadence (monthly or quarterly, matching your VAT filing schedule) 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). Pending participants can't exchange documents and don't count toward your organisation's participant total.
  • KYC is mandatory: you'll provide your SIREN and SIRET, plus at least one supporting document (PDF, JPEG, or PNG, up to 10 MB). Arratech reviews and approves each submission; approval triggers registration in the Annuaire.
  • Once active, 10 document types are registered automatically under 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. 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.

Sending to French recipients

  • Before delivering a document sent under the French regulated process to a French recipient, Arratech verifies that they're registered and active in the French Annuaire. This check applies to every sender, regardless of their own jurisdiction — but only to regulated-process traffic; standard cross-border Peppol invoices are not subject to it.
  • If the recipient isn't registered, the submission is rejected (HTTP 422). If the directory check itself can't be completed, the submission fails with a retryable error (HTTP 503).

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: their platform reports aggregated transaction data to the tax authority on the usual periodic cadence. This happens entirely on the French side — the foreign supplier is not involved.

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.
  • Certified-platform accreditation and the periodic tax-authority reporting pipeline are on our roadmap and not yet available — see Support status below.

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.