Reading the DGFiP’s first official numbers against our own go-live, and what they mean for the businesses whose deadline is still ahead
On October 1st, at the E-Invoicing Exchange Summit in Berlin, the DGFiP shared its first official figures on how France’s e-invoicing reform is performing. My colleagues at Babelway who participated in the summit brought these numbers back to us, and my first instinct was to compare them with what our own teams have seen since September 1, when more than 30 Tradeshift and Babelway customers went live on our Plateforme Agréée (PA) on day one.
One month in, my view is this: the reform has started better than many expected, the real challenge has shifted from registration to data quality, and the businesses that will feel it most have not reached their deadline yet.
France’s E-Invoicing Reform in Numbers: The First Few Weeks
The DGFiP’s headline figures are worth reading in full, because each one says something slightly different about how the market is moving.
| Metric | Figure |
| Businesses enrolled | 5 million, including 72% of the 4 million core target businesses |
| E-invoices sent through the system (Sept 1 to Sept 27) | More than 12 million, amounting to €37 billion |
| Businesses issuing e-invoices since Sept 1 | 140,000, of which more than 95% are not yet required to do so |
Source: Direction générale des Finances publiques (DGFiP), “The first few weeks in numbers,” presented at the E-Invoicing Exchange Summit Europe, Berlin, October 1, 2026
Five million enrolled businesses is a strong start. But 72% of the core target also means that roughly 1.1 million of the businesses the reform was designed around had not enrolled a month after the receiving obligation took effect. Every business in France has been required to receive e-invoices since September 1, so that gap is not a 2027 problem. It is a today problem, and it shows up as invoices that cannot be routed.
The figure I find most telling is the last one. Of the 140,000 businesses already issuing e-invoices, more than 95% are not obligated to do so until September 2027. These are companies choosing to move early, in most cases because their customers are asking for it or because running one invoicing process is simpler than running two. In our experience, this is how mandates really play out: the legal deadline sets the end date, but commercial pressure from large buyers sets the actual pace.
Want to hear how our go-live actually went, from the people who ran it? Join our France retrospective webinar on October 28.
Why Registration Is Not the Same as Readiness
By the end of September, 149 platforms had been definitively accredited by the DGFiP, with 14 more still in the accreditation process. That is a crowded market, and the first weeks showed that accreditation and operational performance are not the same thing. According to first-week launch data published by comparatif-facture-electronique.fr, the daily rejection rate across the system climbed from 7% at launch to 32% within the first week.
Rejections at that level are rarely about the network itself. They come from documents that do not meet the mandated structure: ERPs that still produce PDF or CSV by default rather than UBL, CII or Factur-X, reception addresses that were registered but never tested with a real document, and directory data that does not always match between the central annuaire and the Peppol directory. E-reporting, which has been mandatory for large and mid-sized companies from day one, is still being treated as a second priority in many organisations.
My takeaway is that the badge confirms a platform cleared the DGFiP’s technical requirements. It says nothing about how that platform behaves under real volume, with real customer data, on the busiest days of the month.
Still working through your go-live checklist? Read our FNFE-based readiness checklist.
Our First Month as a Plateforme Agréée: A Clean Launch
Against that backdrop, I am proud of how our launch went. More than 30 customers went live on our PA on September 1, and our launch ran without errors in the invoices we cleared. While other platforms in the market were dealing with rising rejection rates, our customers’ invoices moved through clearance as expected.
That did not happen by chance. We received our PA accreditation from the DGFiP in January 2026 and used the months before go-live to test our validations against the full range of scenarios our customers would actually send, rather than the minimum needed to pass certification. On the inbound side, we automate document receipt, run the mandatory technical validation, and send status lifecycle updates back automatically. On the outbound side, we validate routing against the government directory before anything is transmitted, so documents reach the right recipient the first time. E-reporting is configured per customer, covering B2B international transactions, payment status and B2C obligations as they apply.
The common thread is that we catch problems before an invoice leaves our platform, not after the tax authority’s systems reject it. When most of the market’s friction comes from data quality, that is where a PA earns its place. It also reflects something we have learned over more than a decade of running e-invoicing and Peppol infrastructure across Europe: compliance is won in the preparation, long before the deadline.
What the First Month Means for SMEs Heading to September 2027
For small and micro-enterprises, the next hard date is September 1, 2027, when they must start issuing e-invoices and filing e-reporting. The authorities have taken a pragmatic stance for now, with a soft landing through the end of 2026 for businesses that can show a genuine, documented compliance effort, and penalties expected to apply from 2027. The tolerance period has already been extended once, so I would treat it as a current target rather than a guarantee.
The lesson from the September 2026 cohort is that the problems surfaced within days, not months. SMEs have a full year of runway, and the best use of it is to confirm that their reception channel works with a real document, check that their annuaire entry routes to the right platform, measure the gap between what their ERP produces today and what the mandate requires, and choose a PA based on how it performs in production rather than on accreditation alone. Teams that set an internal deadline in early 2027 will have time to test properly. Teams that start in mid-2027 will be repeating the large-company experience on a shorter runway.
Looking Beyond France
Berlin was also a reminder that France is one mandate among many. Germany is next: from January 1, 2027, companies with turnover above €800,000 must issue EN 16931-compliant e-invoices, and every business follows a year later. Belgium, Poland and others are already live, and the same pattern is repeating in each market: the hard part is format quality and testing, not signing up.
That is why we run France on the same platform we use to support e-invoicing compliance in more than 70 countries. For our customers, that means adding Germany or another market builds on the same platform, connection and team they already work with, rather than starting a new compliance project from scratch.
Getting ready for Germany’s 2027 deadline? Read what buyers and sellers need to know.
Webinar: France Retrospective, Lessons from Tradeshift’s E-Invoicing Go-Live
Join us on October 28, 2026 at 2:00 PM BST / 3:00 PM CET / 9:00 AM EDT for a candid look at our first weeks as a Plateforme Agréée in production. I’ll be joined by Raphael Bres, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Sandy Wauthier, Engineering Manager, and Carolyne Lecomte, Team Leader, Professional Services, with Irina Lalu, Senior Manager, Customer Accounts, moderating. We’ll cover the latest regulatory developments, what we learned from real customer go-lives, and what comes next, with time for your questions. Save my spot.
Talk to Tradeshift About E-Invoicing in France
If you’re preparing for France’s 2027 deadline or managing compliance across several countries, let’s talk.