Base Sociétés
The effective date is not a finish line.
Getting past the deadline is one thing. Staying compliant in the years that follow is another — and it is the one that costs, because it is not settled by a project, but by a routine.
Two deadlines, one underlying requirement.
The French e-invoicing reform applies to transactions between businesses subject to VAT and established in France. It is rolled out in two waves.
Mandatory receipt — for all businesses, with no exception for size
Every business subject to VAT must be able to receive an electronic invoice. There is no extra time depending on size: from that date, a supplier may send you an invoice electronically, and you must be able to receive it.
Mandatory issuing — large companies and mid-sized companies (ETI)
On the same date, these businesses must issue their invoices in electronic format, through an accredited platform. This is where the quality of customer master data becomes decisive: it is you who must correctly designate your recipient.
Mandatory issuing — SMEs, very small businesses and micro-enterprises
The second wave extends the issuing obligation to all remaining businesses: fewer than 250 employees and up to €50 million in turnover. One more year to prepare — not to wait, and for two reasons.
First, the customer data to get right is exactly the same as in 2026: nothing is relaxed for the second wave. Second, your customers are already issuing from 2026 if they are large or mid-sized companies — and they will ask you for your e-invoicing address well before your own deadline.
Which wave are you in?
That is the first question to settle, and it is not decided by turnover alone: the category combines headcount and turnover or balance sheet total. A company with 300 employees and €40 million in turnover is a mid-sized company — and therefore in scope from 2026, despite a modest turnover.
| Category | Criteria | Issuing obligation |
|---|---|---|
| Micro-enterprise | Fewer than 10 employees and turnover or balance sheet not exceeding €2 million | 1 September 2027 |
| SME | Fewer than 250 employees and turnover not exceeding €50 million or balance sheet not exceeding €43 million | 1 September 2027 |
| Mid-sized company (ETI) | Does not fall within the categories above, and employs fewer than 5,000 people | 1 September 2026 |
| Large company | 5,000 employees or more, or above the turnover and balance sheet ceilings for mid-sized companies | 1 September 2026 |
The category is assessed on the last financial year closed before 1 January 2025 — so it does not change if your business changes between now and the deadline. If in doubt about your situation, the criteria are the subject of an official publication (in French) on impots.gouv.fr.
Vocabulary
Invoices go through an accredited platform (French: plateforme agréée) — the official term that replaced the name “partner dematerialisation platform” (PDP). Invoices to the public sector continue to go through the dedicated public portal. The official deadlines and arrangements are authoritative: they are published and updated (in French) on impots.gouv.fr.
Not all your invoices follow the same path.
A French customer, a European customer and a customer outside the EU do not fall under the same arrangements — and therefore do not require the same data. Treating everyone the same way produces two symmetrical errors: demanding an identifier that does not exist, or forgetting one that is mandatory.
Customer established in France
E-invoicing
The invoice itself goes through an accredited platform. It must designate the recipient unambiguously: legal identity, company and establishment identifiers, and the e-invoicing address communicated by the customer.
Customer in the European Union
E-reporting
The invoice does not go through the French system, but the transaction must be reported. The EU VAT number is essential: it justifies the VAT treatment applied and is part of the data reported.
Customer outside the European Union
E-reporting
No electronic invoice is sent to them through this channel, and they have no EU VAT number — demanding one is a mistake. What remains required is the customer's exact identity and location.
Why this detail matters
A screen that shows “incomplete” for a non-EU customer because it lacks an EU VAT number wastes your teams' time and distracts attention from the real anomalies. Base Sociétés determines each customer's regime and requires only what that regime actually requires.
What breaks, and what fixes it.
| Data | What happens if it is wrong | What Base Sociétés does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Legal identity Legal name |
The invoice matches no entity known to your customer; reconciliation fails on their side. | Compares the legal name on your record with the one in the official register, and flags discrepancies — without ever overwriting the value in your management system, which remains the system of record. |
| SIREN Company identifier |
Immediate rejection of the invoice, or invoicing of an entity that no longer exists. | Verifies the company's existence and status in the register, detects closures, and follows the chain of transfers up to the successor that is still active. |
| SIRET Establishment identifier |
The invoice designates a closed site or a different location: it does not reach the department that has to process it. | Checks consistency between the SIRET and the SIREN and the establishment's open/closed status, and proposes the active establishment whose address matches the one on the record. |
| EU VAT number | VAT treatment that cannot be justified in an audit, incomplete e-reporting data. | Checks consistency with the national identifier and has the number validated by the issuing Member State, for EU customers. |
| E-invoicing address BT-49 |
Your accredited platform cannot find the recipient in the directory: it rejects the invoice on submission, before transmission. With a wrong suffix, the invoice goes out but gets lost on the customer's side. | It is carried by the SIREN. The default address is built on the recipient's SIREN; it can be refined to the SIRET of an establishment, or extended with a routing suffix specific to the customer. Getting the SIREN and SIRET right therefore means getting the addressing itself right — only the optional suffix remains to be confirmed with the customer. |
| Legal status Insolvency proceedings |
You keep invoicing and supplying a company in court-supervised reorganisation or liquidation. | Monitors legal announcements and flags ongoing proceedings. No data is changed: the information is passed on for a commercial decision. |
The most widespread misconception about the e-invoicing address
Many present it as a mysterious piece of data, to be requested one by one from all your customers. That is inaccurate: every company has a default address built on its SIREN — companies are pre-registered in the directory on that basis. A customer may choose to refine it, to the SIRET of an establishment or with a suffix pointing to a department; it is then, and only then, that they must communicate it to you.
The consequence is direct: a wrong SIREN is a wrong routing address. The useful work is not collecting addresses, it is making sure that the identifier they derive from is the right one.
Worth noting, because the confusion is common: an invoice is rejected by a platform, on an automatic check — most often your own, on submission. An invoice is refused by your customer, for a commercial reason. The first never reaches them; only the second involves a disagreement.
Compliance is not a state. It is upkeep.
On the day of the deadline, your customer master data may be flawless. The problem starts the next day: every week, companies close down, are taken over, move, change their organisation or their addressing. Nobody tells you.
A one-off clean-up project — done in-house or bought from a service provider — answers the first question and not the second. Twelve months later, the same drift has set in again, and the same project has to be paid for again.
That is why Base Sociétés is not designed as a clean-up service, but as an operational tool: the check reruns, records become eligible again as soon as new information appears, and the oldest verifications are naturally redone after a certain time.
What reruns by itself
A record the tool cannot conclude on today is not set aside for good: it comes back into the queue by itself as soon as the missing data arrives.
The movement does not stop at the border.
Several Member States have already made e-invoicing mandatory on their domestic market, and the European Union is preparing to extend digital reporting of transaction data to intra-EU trade by around 2030.
In other words: the addressing identifier of a European customer, optional today under French law, will become useful well before it becomes mandatory — and mandatory afterwards. Collecting it now, when the customer writes to you spontaneously to communicate it, costs infinitely less than requesting it later from thousands of accounts.