If you run a small business in France and you signed up with an approved platform before 1 September, you may think the e-invoicing job is done. The first numbers from the go-live say otherwise.
By 14 September, about 4.81 million entities had designated an approved platform. That is the good news, and it is real progress from the readiness figures the DGFiP was publishing in the spring. The other number is the one to sit with. Of the invoice flows reported to the tax authority in the first two weeks, 14.4 percent were non-compliant. On 10 September alone the rejection rate reportedly reached 43.5 percent. These figures come from one industry tracker, VATCalc, and have not been published by the DGFiP itself, so treat them as indicative. A second tracker, Sovos, independently put the market-wide rejection rate in the first weeks at roughly 20 percent, so the pattern is corroborated even where the exact figures are not.
What changed
Nothing in the law. The obligation to receive e-invoices applies to every VAT-registered business in France since 1 September 2026. Large and mid-size businesses must also issue them and send e-reporting data. Small and micro businesses issue from September 2027. Penalties are not being applied during 2026 for businesses making a documented effort.
What changed is that the system is now live with real invoices, and it is rejecting a lot of them. The reasons are boring and fixable. A customer's SIREN or SIRET is wrong or out of date, so the directory cannot route the invoice. A mandatory field is empty. The VAT treatment does not match the transaction type. Or the chain from your software to your platform to your customer's platform was never tested end to end, and the invoice fails somewhere in the middle.
None of this is about which platform you picked. A rejected invoice on a good platform is still a rejected invoice, and until it is accepted, your customer has no legal invoice to pay.
What to do this week
- Check the SIREN and SIRET of your 20 biggest customers against the official registry. Stale identifiers are the single most common cause of an invoice that never arrives.
- Send one real invoice to one real customer and watch it all the way to an accepted status. If you only receive invoices, ask your biggest supplier to send you one and confirm you see it on your platform.
- Look at the required fields your software fills in automatically. The customer's SIREN, whether the sale is goods or services, and the delivery address if it differs are new since September and are often blank in older templates.
- If you are still choosing a platform, use the official list on impots.gouv.fr. It was refreshed on 22 September 2026. Vendor copies drift.
- Keep a written record of what you did. The no-penalty position for 2026 covers businesses that can show they tried.
This briefing is general information, not legal or tax advice. Check your own situation with your accountant or platform.