French electronic invoicing

The French electronic invoicing reform requires invoices between businesses to travel through an approved platform, and transaction data to be filed with the tax administration. Odoo operates its own approved platform: the company registers on it from its own database, with no further intermediary.

What the reform requires

The timetable

Deadline	Obligation
1 September 2026	Every VAT-registered business must be able to receive an electronic invoice, whatever its size. Large and mid-sized companies must in addition issue all their invoices in electronic format.
1 September 2027	Small and medium-sized enterprises and micro-enterprises must in turn issue in electronic format.

Two separate obligations

Scheme	Purpose
Electronic invoicing	The exchange of invoices between VAT-registered businesses, platform to platform, in a structured format.
E-reporting	The filing with the administration of transaction data that falls outside the previous channel: sales to private individuals, transactions with other countries.

Approved platform and compatible solution

Two qualifications coexist, and they are frequently confused.

Qualification	What it covers
Approved platform	An operator registered by the administration, authorised to issue, transmit and receive electronic invoices. The registration is granted for three years, renewable.
Compatible solution	A tool that is not registered, but that offers the expected functions and connects to at least one approved platform.

Odoo appears on the list of registered operators published by the administration, its registration number having been granted on 15 April 2026.

Installing the module

French electronic invoicing rests on a dedicated module, which is not installed by default.

1. Open Apps.
2. Click Update Apps List, then confirm: without this step, a recently published module does not appear in the list.
3. Remove the Apps filter and search for pdp.
4. On the France - E-Invoicing (Approved Platform) tile, click Activate.

Activating electronic invoicing

1. Check that the French fiscal localisation is installed (see section 5.5).
2. Check that the company record carries its SIREN and its full address: this information determines whether registration will go through.
3. Open Accounting › Configuration › Settings.
4. In the French Electronic Invoicing section, click Activate Electronic Invoicing.

Registering on the approved platform

Registration attaches the company to the platform and enters it in the directory, where its business partners will find it.

1. From the settings section, launch the registration.
2. Fill in the company's Identifier and the Email, which will receive the platform's notifications.
3. Leave Pilot Phase unticked, except for a trial run ahead of the deadline (see below).
4. Click Authenticate: Odoo opens the identity verification portal in a new tab, operated by a qualified signature provider. The Open link button takes you back to it.
5. On that portal, name the person who will sign, receive the verification code at the address given, then upload the signatory's identity document and sign the certificate.
6. Once the identity has been verified, registration is validated automatically. If the identifier is already attached to another platform in the directory, Odoo asks for explicit confirmation before migrating it.
7. The Refresh button lets you follow progress for as long as the platform has not confirmed.

The identifier always begins with the SIREN. What follows is optional, and serves to designate a reception point finer than a legal entity.

Form	What it designates
SIREN	The legal entity. Nine digits. This is the common form, and the one Odoo suggests.
SIREN_SIRET	A specific establishment. The SIRET is fourteen digits.
SIREN_SIRET_RoutingCode	A department inside an establishment.
SIREN_AddressingSuffix	A department inside the entity, without going through the establishment.

The wait between signature and connection

Once the procedure is launched, the window displays Authentication in progress and will not move on its own. Odoo is waiting for the signature provider to confirm that the identity is verified and the certificate signed. Until that confirmation arrives, the screen stays as it is and the final validation button does not appear.

Button	What it does
Refresh	Asks the provider for the status again. This is the button to use to see whether the confirmation has arrived.
Open link	Reopens the verification portal, to resume an interrupted procedure.
Cancel	Abandons the procedure and sets the status back to failed.

Once the company is connected, two boxes appear in the section, visible only at that stage.

Box	What it governs
Enable e-reporting & sending of invoices to the PPF	Governs issuing and the production of the e-reporting flows. It is ticked by default: it is therefore a box to untick if you do not want to issue yet, not a box to tick.
Participate in the pilot phase	Registers the company for the administration's pilot phase. Unticked by default.

Testing before the deadline

A pilot phase lets you put the whole chain through its paces before the obligation applies. It is switched on with the Pilot Phase box, offered in the registration window itself. The setting is then found again in Accounting › Configuration › Settings, section French Electronic Invoicing, under the label Pilot Phase: a block that only appears once the company is connected.

Checking that a customer is reachable

Before issuing, you need to know whether the recipient is listed in the directory and whether they accept the format used. Three pieces of information determine the answer, and they are all set in the same place: the customer record, Accounting tab, Customer Invoices block. The tab is called Invoicing when only that application is installed.

The electronic address scheme

This is the most important setting in the whole configuration, and the least obvious.

An electronic invoicing address is made up of two parts: a scheme, which names the register to search in, and a value, which identifies the company within that register. Odoo offers about a hundred schemes, one or more per country.

For a French partner connected to an approved platform, the scheme must be France FRCTC Electronic Address, and the value their identification number.

This field is not normally filled in by hand. It is derived from information entered elsewhere:

1. Check that the contact's Country is indeed France.
2. In the body of the record, under the VAT number, fill in the Siren/Siret field. On a non-French contact, that same field appears in the Sales & Purchase tab, section Misc, under the label Company ID.
3. Odoo then carries that number over into the France FRCTC Electronic Address field of the Invoicing tab.

A contact whose Company ID is empty will therefore have no electronic address, and the check will fail without the reason being shown on that field.

The value follows the same four forms as your own identifier, described in section 13.4: the SIREN alone, or completed with the SIRET, a routing code or an addressing suffix. The check is the same on both sides, and so is the error message.

Odoo often proposes a default scheme, derived from the country and the identifiers entered. Check it: this is where most verification failures are lodged.

The invoice format

Fill in France E-Invoicing (UBL 2.1). Without it, Odoo does not even start the directory search and reports an invalid format straight away.

The check

1. Open the customer record.
2. Click Verify: Odoo queries the directory and fills in the E-Invoicing State field, which takes one of the following values:

State	What it means
Not verified yet	The check has not yet been carried out for this partner.
Partner is in the annuaire	The customer is reachable: the invoice can be sent to them through the platform.
Partner is not in the annuaire	The customer is not registered yet. The invoice cannot be sent to them through this channel.
Partner cannot receive format	The customer is registered but does not accept the format chosen: the exchange format has to be adjusted.

1. Finally, check that the sending method chosen is by Approved Platform.

Issuing an invoice

The issuing procedure does not change: it is the channel that changes.

1. Draw up and confirm the invoice as usual (see chapitre 12). It then takes the Ready to send status, on three conditions: your company is connected, the customer is reachable in the directory, and the invoice is posted.
2. Check that every line carries at least a product or a label, and exactly one tax.
3. Click Send.

4. In the sending window, check that the by Peppol option is ticked , that is what the sending screen calls the channel, where the contact record calls it by Approved Platform.

5. Finally, check that the customer record carries their Siren/Siret: without it, Odoo cannot identify the recipient. The Tax ID plays a separate role, described in section 13.9.1.

6. Validate the send.

The invoice is converted to the structured format, deposited on the platform and routed to the customer's own. It moves to the Pending Reception status, then Done once delivered to the recipient's platform. The structured file is attached in its message thread.

Receiving vendor bills

This is the side that concerns every VAT-registered business from 1 September 2026, including those whose obligation to issue only arrives later.

Two inbound channels during the transition

Between the two deadlines, your vendors are not all under the same rules. Large companies and mid-sized companies issue electronically from 1 September 2026; small and medium-sized companies and micro-businesses are only bound a year later. Until then, the latter legitimately keep sending you a PDF by email.

That PDF does not arrive through the platform, and the Incoming Invoices Journal will never see it: that journal only receives what the platform hands over. The path stays the one that existed before the reform, described in chapitre 12: the purchase journal's email alias receives the message and creates a draft bill with the PDF attached, then Document Digitization extracts the data from it by optical reading.

	Through the platform	By email
What arrives	A structured file, plus the PDF	A PDF alone
What Odoo fills in	Vendor, lines and VAT taken from the file	Data extracted by optical reading, to be checked
Life cycle	Statuses tracked, and posting counts as acceptance	None: it is an ordinary bill
Prerequisite	Incoming Invoices Journal filled in	Email alias on the purchase journal

The bill arrives on its own

You have nothing to do. The bill appears in your purchase journal, in draft, vendor recognised, lines and VAT taken up, with the structured file attached.

Odoo queries the platform several times a day. One prerequisite only: the Incoming Invoices Journal must be filled in in the configuration. Without it, nothing is imported and your vendors' invoices stay stuck on the platform side.

Check, then accept

This is the point that surprises people most, and it has no equivalent in current habits.

Refusing a bill

1. Click Cancel. Odoo opens the Send Response Message window, with the Refused status preselected.
2. Choose a reason from the list. The reasons are imposed by the standard, they cannot be written freely.
3. Enter the explanatory note: mandatory for a refusal. The field has no label, only a placeholder.
4. Send.

Twelve reasons are offered:

Incorrect VAT rate	Incorrect Total Amount
Billing calculation error	Legal information missing
Wrong recipient	Unknown transaction
Unknown sender	Contract completed
Duplicate Invoice	Order number is incorrect or missing
Incorrect electronic billing address	Contract reference required to process the missing invoice

Matching with the purchase order

When the bill received quotes your order number, Odoo finds the order and attaches the lines with no intervention. This is the most immediate gain of the reform on the purchasing side: keying in vendor bills disappears, and checking them comes down to a comparison.

The case of expense claims

The reform changes the treatment of expenses paid for by an employee, and the trap is easy to miss. Everything depends on the name the invoice is made out to.

Invoice in the company's name, paid for by an employee. This is an invoice between VAT-registered businesses: it reaches you through the platform, with its full life cycle. That the employee put up the money does not change the nature of the document. The treatment has three stages: the vendor bill carries the expense and the deductible VAT and creates a debt to the vendor; a transfer entry clears the vendor account and creates the debt to the employee; the employee is reimbursed.

Invoice in the employee's name. The vendor has invoiced a private individual: the transaction is out of scope, nothing will reach you through the platform. The receipt stays attached to the expense claim, as it does today.

Following the life cycle of an invoice

The real change brought by the reform is not the format of the file: it is that every stage of an invoice's journey is now timestamped and binding. You still have to know where to read it.

Showing the column, once and for all

The status does not appear on the invoice form. It is read in the list, provided the column is shown.

1. Open the customer invoice list.
2. Click the column selection icon, at the far right of the header row.
3. Tick E-Invoicing Status. The setting is remembered.

A single screen is then enough to follow a whole portfolio. The Group By menu also offers this status: handy for isolating refused or pending invoices in one go.

Reading the statuses

Status	Who issues it	What it means
Ready to send	Odoo	Posted, recipient reachable, not yet deposited.
Submitted	Your platform	Deposited. This is your proof of issue.
Received	The customer's platform	The document has crossed the network.
Made Available	The customer's platform	The invoice is made available to the customer, and the step is timestamped.
Approved	Your customer	Approved for payment.
Refused	Your customer	Reasoned refusal, correction expected.
Rejected	The customer's platform	Technical anomaly: the file could not be processed. To be corrected and redeposited.
With Payments	You	Payment reported. Bears on when VAT becomes chargeable on services.
Cancelled	You	Invoice withdrawn by the issuer.
Done	Odoo	Routing complete, with no further business response expected.

E-reporting

What decides whether a sale enters e-reporting

A sale between a French taxable person and another French taxable person falls under electronic invoicing. E-reporting is reserved for sales to a non-taxable person and for international transactions. Odoo sorts every invoice into one category or the other on its own, without saying so on screen.

Two fields of the customer record come into play, and they do not serve the same purpose.

Field	Role
Siren/Siret	Identifies the recipient for sending. Odoo only accepts it if it is made of nine or fourteen digits, with no other character.
Tax ID	Decides the classification on its own. On a sale, if it is empty or reduced to a single character, the invoice is classified B2C and enters e-reporting.

The classification therefore does not look at the Siren/Siret. A business customer whose record carries their establishment number but not their VAT number is treated as an individual.

Three conditions are checked when the file is built, and they bear on both parties, yours as well as the customer's:

1. the electronic address scheme and its value are filled in;
2. the Siren/Siret holds exactly nine or fourteen digits;
3. the Tax ID is filled in, and is not /.

Any one of them missing blocks the send, and its reason is shown in the window. It is the third that guards the third row of the table: with no VAT number the file cannot be built, so the sale cannot be declared twice. It is declared once, in e-reporting, and the customer receives nothing.

The four combinations, and what each produces

The two fields combine into four situations. Two are sound, two are not, and neither of the bad ones raises anything on screen.

Tax ID	Siren/Siret	What happens
filled	filled	No e-reporting, and sending through the platform is possible. This is the correct state for a business customer, provided the send is actually carried out.
filled	empty	No e-reporting, and sending is impossible for want of a recipient identifier. The sale is declared nowhere.
empty	filled	The sale enters e-reporting. Platform sending, for its part, fails when the file is built: the file requires the VAT number of both parties. The customer is therefore not served.
empty	empty	E-reporting only, no sending possible. Correct if the customer really is a private individual.

It is the record of the customer's commercial entity that is read, never the invoicing address or the contact carried by the invoice. An attached address inherits the identifiers of its company, unless it is itself ticked Company: it then becomes its own commercial entity, inherits nothing, and falls to B2C whatever the parent record carries.

Following the statuses

The E-Reporting Status is a field separate from the previous one. It does not describe the journey of the invoice but its inclusion in the periodic filings intended for the administration.

Status	Meaning
Out of scope	The invoice does not fall within the scope of e-reporting.
Pending	It is waiting to be included in the next filing.
Ready	It has been built and is ready to go.
Sent	It has been transmitted to the platform.
Completed	The flow that carried it has been accepted and closed.
Error	Transmission failed: the reason is shown on the invoice.

The status is tracked in each invoice's message thread: every change leaves a dated trace there.

Filing the flows

Transaction data falling outside the scope of business-to-business invoicing is the subject of periodic filings.

1. Open Accounting › Configuration › Settings and set the E-Reporting Periodicity according to your VAT regime: standard regime monthly or quarterly, simplified regime monthly, exempt regime two-monthly.
2. Open Accounting › Reporting › France › E-reporting to consult the filings built.
3. Check the content, then click Send.

Takings collected at the point of sale fall under the same scheme, through a dedicated extension: they are aggregated and filed at the same periodicity.

Points to watch