French Electronic Invoice

With the adoption of the amendment to the Finance Act for 2022, the timetable for the widespread use of electronic invoicing, as well as its implementation procedures, are specified. An experiment should be able to be deployed from January 2024 on the public invoicing portal.

The result of a long debate and inspired by several European partners including Italy, the article 26 of “ loi de finances réctificative pour 2022” provides that “VAT taxable persons in France must, in due course, issue, transmit and receive invoices in electronic format in their transactions with other taxable persons”. They will also have to « transfer the billing data to the tax authorities as well as data relating to non-domestic transactions or transactions with a non-taxable person ». The confidentiality of this data will be protected by the administration.

The timetable of the reform

The deployment of the electronic invoicing obligation will take place gradually, taking into account the size of the companies, in order to allow each of them to appropriate its new obligations under the best conditions. Electronic billing will apply    :

• From the 1 of July 2024, on receipt to all taxable persons and, for the issue, to large companies,
• From the 1 of January, 2025, for mid-sized companies,
• From the 1 of January, 2026, small and medium-sized companies and “micro-enterprises”

The deployment of the obligation to transmit data to the administration will follow the same schedule.

The modalities for the generalization of electronic invoicing

To fulfil their obligations companies will be free to choose:

• A dematerialisation platform known as a “partner” of the administration,
• The public invoicing portal, which will be based on the “Chorus Pro” platform (which has been providing paperless invoice exchange for transactions with the public sector since 2017).

The public invoicing portal

The public portal made for companies will take into account their degree of digital maturity. It will also permit the smaller companies electronic invoicing at a reduced cost by offering several minimum base of services

The creation of this portal has had improvements made during the summer of 2022. Testing may be deployed from the 3 of January 2024, before the device is implemented.

The benefits gained from electronic invoicing generalisation

As a means of simplifying and speeding up the digital transition for businesses, the widespread use of electronic invoicing represents a gain of more than 4.5 billion per year, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

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