France abandoned its free e-invoicing portal — every business picks a paid Plateforme Agréée.
For two years, every French bakery and chartered-accountancy firm budgeted around the same line in the 2026 e-invoicing reform: a free state portal would carry their invoices. On 15 October 2024 the finance ministry walked it back in one paragraph. The reception obligation on 1 September 2026 did not move. The state now points operators at 100+ private Plateformes Agréées (state-accredited e-invoicing platforms), half of them not yet officially registered, under penalties of €15 per non-compliant invoice and €250 per missed e-reporting transmission.
01The pain
One paragraph. That was all Bercy — the Paris home of the French finance ministry — needed on 15 October 2024 to erase two years of small-business planning. The free Portail Public de Facturation (PPF, the state e-invoicing channel France had told every baker and bookkeeper to build around) was demoted to a directory. Libeo, the French B2B-payments fintech, recorded the reversal flat: the PPF was abandoned "as a platform for emitting and receiving invoices."4 What survives is a lookup tool. Every VAT-registered business now picks a private platform. And pays for it.
The deadline did not move. The DGFiP (France's tax administration) keeps 1 September 2026 as the day every business must be able to receive an electronic invoice; large firms and mid-caps must also issue from that date.1,2 The trap is buried in two adjectives. The DGFiP separates a fully accredited platform from one whose application is still pending, and only the first is legally authorised on day one. A baker in Nantes who signs with a pending vendor in spring 2026 is buying a service that may not transmit when the obligation lands. Penalties start the same morning: €15 per non-compliant invoice, €250 per missed e-reporting transmission, and refusal of VAT deduction on anything arriving outside the accredited channel.3
The quieter trap is e-reporting — parallel transmission of B2C and cross-border sales data to the tax authority. It catches a Bordeaux wine-shop ringing up tourists and a Roubaix online retailer shipping into Belgium. Many micro-firms learned it existed only when their accountant explained it. Parliamentary amendments through 2025 tried to pry the September date open. None did.
Further reading
- 1 entreprendre.service-public.gouv.fr (DGFiP / French government SME-information portal) — "Facturation électronique : un calendrier en plusieurs étapes": entreprendre.service-public.gouv.fr/actualites/A15683
- 2 impots.gouv.fr (Direction générale des Finances publiques — French tax administration) — "Facturation électronique et plateformes agréées": impots.gouv.fr/facturation-electronique-et-plateformes-agreees
- 3 Compta Online (French chartered-accountants' professional press) — "Facturation électronique : ce que les entreprises doivent savoir": compta-online.com/facturation-electronique-ao5562
- 4 Libeo — "Réforme de la facture électronique 2026 : le guide complet" (French B2B-payments fintech editorial guide): libeo.io/blog/reforme-facture-electronique-2026
02Who solves this today
Three French-market vendors that name accredited-platform status on their own homepage: an SMB accounting platform, an established ERP, and a dedicated state-registered platform. Each entry verified live on the date of writing.
Listed providers publicly market to the Plateforme Agréée / réforme 2026 niche on their own French-language homepages. Inclusion is not endorsement. Adjacent French-market vendors were considered and excluded where their homepages either did not WebFetch cleanly (Sage France's facturation-électronique page returned 403, Cegid's dedicated facturation-électronique sub-page returned 404 although the root self-markets the PA on its homepage) or did not contain a verbatim PA / PDP / Plateforme Agréée self-marketing phrase on the homepage itself (Libeo's homepage advertises "Facture électronique incluse" but does not self-market as a PA — its editorial guide is cited above in section 01 as a source, not as a solution). Trade-press outlets (Compta Online, Libeo guide), the DGFiP's own publications (impots.gouv.fr, entreprendre.service-public.gouv.fr) and the SME-federation positions are cited above in section 01 as the source of the operator-side narrative, not as solution providers.
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