E-invoicing in France: since September 2026, your ERP is no longer enough

France’s e-invoicing reform entered its practical phase on 1 September 2026. It is often summed up as a 2027 deadline, which makes people miss the obligation that already applies to everyone.

Two obligations, two calendars

• Receiving: since 1 September 2026, every VAT-registered company established in France must be able to receive an electronic invoice. No size is exempt — including a three-person business.
• Issuing, and transmitting transaction data (e-reporting): since 1 September 2026 for large and mid-sized companies; from 1 September 2027 for SMEs, very small businesses and micro-enterprises.

The framework comes from Ordinance no. 2021-1190 of 15 September 2021, amended several times. The dates above are those of the current calendar; if you are unsure about your own case, the reference is the tax administration’s documentation and your accountant.

A PDF sent by email is not an electronic invoice

This is the most common misreading. For the purposes of the reform, an electronic invoice is a document in a structured format — Factur-X, UBL or CII — transmitted through a regulated circuit. Factur-X is hybrid: a human-readable PDF with the data embedded as XML. A plain PDF attached to an email remains a dematerialized paper invoice: it does not meet the obligation.

Your ERP is not an approved platform

The circuit necessarily goes through an approved platform (plateforme agréée, formerly "PDP"), registered by the tax administration. The official list is published and kept up to date on impots.gouv.fr; industry counts put it at around one hundred and fifty registered platforms at the end of August 2026.

No management software becomes an approved platform merely because it can produce an invoice. That holds for proprietary ERPs as much as for open source ones: Dolibarr issues invoices perfectly well and can produce Factur-X, but it must be connected to an approved platform for inbound and outbound flows to follow the regulatory circuit. The equation is the same everywhere: your management tool + an approved platform.

What it changes in your organization

The technical part is the cheapest. The work is in the rest:

• The quality of identification data: your customers' company identifiers, billing addresses, mandatory mentions. An approximate third-party register survives paper invoicing; it blocks in a structured format.
• Invoice lifecycle: an electronic invoice carries statuses (submitted, rejected, paid…). Someone has to follow them, and know what to do with a rejection.
• Archiving: where received invoices are kept, for how long, and who can retrieve them during an inspection.
• The transitional dual circuit: until September 2027, your smaller suppliers will keep sending PDFs. You need two processing chains, not one.

Three questions before choosing a platform

• Is it registered, and does it appear on the list published by the tax administration? A commercial promise of forthcoming registration is not a registration.
• How does it connect to your management tool — native connector, API, file drop? And who maintains that connector when the ERP is upgraded?
• What happens if you leave it? Your invoices and their statuses must be exportable in a usable format. This is exactly the vendor lock-in question, applied to a legal obligation you cannot opt out of.

If you are starting a company now

That is the simplest case: you have no history to migrate. The choice of management tool and the choice of platform are made at the same time, and the question of which management tool to start with gets a fairly clear answer here — you will need somewhere to hold your contacts and invoices cleanly in any case.

Sources

• economie.gouv.fr — Everything about electronic invoicing
• impots.gouv.fr — list of approved platforms
• Bpifrance — Mandatory electronic invoicing