Guide
France, 1 September 2026.
From that date every business subject to French VAT has to be able to receive electronic invoices through an approved platform, and the largest ones have to issue them. This is what the reform actually requires, checked against the tax administration's own pages rather than summarised from someone else's summary.
The calendar
| Date | Who | What becomes mandatory |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-01 | Every business subject to French VAT, whatever its size | Being able to receive electronic invoices through an approved platform. |
| 2026-09-01 | Large companies and mid-sized companies (ETI) | Issuing electronic invoices, plus transmitting transaction and payment data. |
| 2027-09-01 | SMEs, small businesses, micro-enterprises, auto-entrepreneurs | Issuing electronic invoices, plus transmitting transaction and payment data. |
Verified on 2026-08-16 against impots.gouv.fr, Je découvre la facturation électronique, impots.gouv.fr, Facturation électronique et plateformes agréées. Calendars for tax reforms move. If you are reading this well after that date, check the source before acting on it, and tell us if it has changed.
The part most summaries get wrong
The headline everyone repeats is the 2026 and 2027 split, which makes it sound as though small businesses have an extra year to do nothing. They do not. The delay applies only to issuing. The obligation to be able to receive lands on everyone at the same moment, in September 2026, auto-entrepreneurs included.
That asymmetry is deliberate and it is what makes the reform work: on the first day, every large supplier starts issuing, and every one of their customers has to be somewhere those invoices can arrive. If you sell to large companies, you will start receiving structured invoices from them whether or not you have thought about it.
What an approved platform is, and why the public portal is not one
An approved platform is a private company registered by the state to operate e-invoicing services: it transmits and receives the invoices, and passes the required data to the tax administration. The regime was known as PDP and was renamed plateforme agréée in 2025, so both names refer to the same thing and you will meet both.
The public portal, the PPF, was originally meant to carry invoices for free. That role was removed in October 2024. It remains as a directory and a data concentrator, which means there is no free public pipe: exchange runs through an approved platform, and choosing one is a real decision with a real cost attached.
What we are, and what we are not
AgentToolWorks is not an approved platform, is not a PDP, and is not affiliated with the DGFiP, the AIFE, OpenPeppol or the European Commission. We do not transmit invoices over any network. If a vendor tells you a generation API alone makes you compliant, that is worth checking before you sign anything.
What we do is the document itself. InvoiceForge builds a UBL 2.1 invoice against the EN 16931 semantic model, checks it against the rules that get documents rejected, and reads incoming UBL and CII, which is the structured payload inside a Factur-X file. That is the layer your software has to get right before anything is transmitted, and it is the layer where a mistake is silent until a counterparty's system refuses the document.
The honest division of labour: we make the document correct, an approved platform gets it there. You need both. We have deliberately not applied for approval, because the regime requires infrastructure held inside the EU and a valid ISO 27001 certification, and claiming to be on that path when we are not would be the sort of thing this whole site exists to avoid.
What to do now
- Pick an approved platform. The registered list is published by the tax administration and is the only list that counts. Do this first, because everything else depends on which one you are on.
- Find out what your invoicing software actually emits. Most systems that say they support e-invoicing emit something close to the standard, and close is what gets rejected. You can paste a real invoice into our free validator and see every rule it breaks, without the document leaving your browser.
- Fix the mapping, not the invoice. A rejection is almost never one bad document. It is a field your export has been filling wrongly on every document, and it will keep doing it until you change the mapping. The rule index explains what makes each rule fire.
- Test receiving, not only issuing. This is the half that arrives in 2026 for everyone and the half nobody rehearses. If you cannot read a structured invoice from a supplier today, September is the wrong moment to find out.
Questions people actually ask
- Do I have to do anything by 1 September 2026 if I only receive invoices?
- Yes. Every business subject to French VAT has to be able to receive electronic invoices from that date, whatever its size. Receiving is not the part with a delay; issuing is.
- When do small businesses have to start issuing electronic invoices?
- 1 September 2027. Large companies and mid-sized companies start on 1 September 2026. Auto-entrepreneurs are in the 2027 group for issuing, and in the 2026 group for receiving like everyone else.
- What is an approved platform?
- A private company registered by the French state to operate electronic invoicing and data transmission services. The regime was called PDP and was renamed to plateforme agréée in 2025. Exchange runs through one of them: the public portal no longer carries invoices itself.
- Is AgentToolWorks an approved platform?
- No, and we are not applying to become one. We build and check the document; an approved platform transmits it. You need both, and we would rather say so plainly than let the distinction stay blurry until it costs you a deadline.
- Can I just email a PDF invoice after September 2026?
- Not for transactions in scope. A PDF sent by email is not an electronic invoice under the reform: what counts is a structured document exchanged through an approved platform. A PDF with structured data embedded in it, in the Factur-X form, is a different matter and is one of the accepted formats.