France E-Invoicing Since 1 September 2026: What Still Arrives as a PDF or a Photo

Since 1 September 2026, every VAT-registered business established in France must be able to receive electronic invoices through an approved platform (plateforme agréée). Large companies and mid-sized companies (ETI) must also issue them from that date; SMEs and micro-businesses follow on 1 September 2027. That is the short answer. The longer one matters more for whoever processes the paperwork: a large share of the documents a French company handles is still going to arrive as a PDF attachment or a phone photo, this year and after.

This guide covers what the reform actually requires, the dates by company size, and the six kinds of documents it does not turn into structured data — so you can size the manual work that is left before you budget for it.

What changed on 1 September 2026

The reform applies to domestic B2B transactions between companies established in France and subject to VAT. For those invoices, email and paper are replaced by an exchange between approved platforms, and the invoice has to travel in a structured format — Factur-X, UBL or CII. A plain PDF sent by email is not an electronic invoice under the reform, even though it is a digital file.

Sales to consumers (B2C) and international transactions are outside e-invoicing. They fall under e-reporting: the company sends transaction and payment data to the tax administration, but the document the customer or foreign supplier receives does not change.

The calendar by company size

Under article 1737 of the French General Tax Code, failing to issue an invoice in electronic form when required carries a fine of €50 per invoice, capped at €15,000 per calendar year. Check the current wording on Légifrance and confirm your own situation with your accountant (expert-comptable) — this article is not tax advice.

What still arrives as a PDF or a photo

Receiving capability does not mean every inbound document becomes structured data. These six categories keep arriving the old way:

1. 1Invoices from SME and micro-business suppliers, until 1 September 2027. They must be able to receive e-invoices now, but their obligation to issue them starts a year later. Many small suppliers will keep sending PDFs until they have to stop.
2. 2Invoices from foreign suppliers. A supplier not established in France is outside the domestic e-invoicing scope. Your German, Spanish or UK supplier's invoice still lands as a PDF, and you still need its data.
3. 3Receipts for expenses. The fuel, restaurant, hotel and taxi receipts behind an expense report are consumer sales on the supplier's side — e-reporting, not e-invoicing. Your employee still hands in a photo of a paper ticket.
4. 4Documents that are not invoices. Delivery notes (bons de livraison), quotes (devis) and purchase orders (bons de commande) were never part of the reform. Matching an invoice against its delivery note is still done from a PDF or a photo.
5. 5Invoices from before the switch. Anything dated before your suppliers moved — for an audit, a due diligence, a late claim or a catch-up of unbooked documents — stays in the format it was issued in.
6. 6Operations of your entities abroad. A Belgian, Swiss or Spanish subsidiary follows its own country's rules and timeline, not the French one.

How to size what is left

Before choosing any tool, count. Take the last 100 inbound documents your team handled and mark each one that falls into the six categories above. The percentage you get is the manual work the reform does not remove — and it tells you whether that work is a rounding error or a line in your budget.

For a firm with mostly large French suppliers, the number may be small. For an accounting practice working with SMEs, a construction or logistics business full of delivery notes, or any company with foreign suppliers and field staff submitting expenses, it can easily be most of the pile until 2027 — and categories 2 to 6 do not end in 2027.

Where WhappScan fits — and where it does not

WhappScan is not an approved platform (plateforme agréée) and does not replace one. In-scope e-invoices from French suppliers must be received through your platform.

What WhappScan does is the part the reform leaves out: it reads the documents that still arrive as a PDF or a photo — invoices, receipts, delivery notes, quotes and purchase orders — and returns their fields (supplier, VAT number, date, VAT, total, and each line where the document has them) ready for Excel or your accounting software. Staff or clients can send the photo by WhatsApp, without installing anything.

You can check it on your own documents first: the invoice to Excel tool and the receipt to Excel tool are free, need no signup and take up to three documents a day. For delivery notes, use the delivery note tool.

For the wider picture across countries, see PDF invoices after the e-invoicing mandate.

For every country side by side, see e-invoicing mandates country by country.

Sources

• impots.gouv.fr — Electronic invoicing and approved platforms
• Légifrance — Article 1737 of the General Tax Code
• ARAPL — Electronic invoicing: what changed in September 2026