Mandatory electronic invoicing: deadlines shifted by one year
Published on 4 October 2021
During the Council of Ministers of September 15, 2021, an ordinance relating to the generalization of electronic invoicing in transactions between VAT taxpayers was presented. This ordinance postpones to 2024 (instead of 2023) the obligation for a company to accept invoices in electronic format and to 2026 (instead of 2025) the obligation to issue them, as provided in the 2020 Finance Law. A way to simplify the work of companies, but also the detection of fraud.
The actors concerned by the dematerialization of invoices
Since January 1, 2020, companies are already required to send their invoices to the public sector in electronic format.
According to article 195 of the Finance Act, the generalization of electronic invoicing concerns domestic transactions between taxable persons for value added tax (B2B). The ordinance also includes a section on the additional transmission of transaction data (international B2B, B2C and payment data). These obligations are expected to be deployed between 2024 and 2026 according to a progressive timetable that depends on the size of the company.
The benefits of dematerializing invoices
With this ordinance, the government is pursuing several objectives:
- Lightening the administrative workload for companies and reducing payment times. "The switch to electronic invoicing will represent a gain for the economy of at least 4.5 billion euros," states the official press release;
- simplify the VAT reporting obligations of businesses through pre-filling of returns;
- improve fraud detection;
- improve the real knowledge of the activities of French companies.
Reminder of future obligations
Companies subject to VAT in France will have to:
- issue, transmit and receive invoices in electronic form in their transactions with other VAT taxable persons;
- transmit invoice data to the tax authorities;
- transmit to the tax authorities additional transaction data that are not within the scope of electronic invoicing, such as transactions with a non-taxable person (B2C), transactions between non-domestic taxable persons and payment data for services.
The schedule of the new deadlines from 2024 to 2026
- July 1, 2024: the 300 largest French companies must send their invoices only electronically AND all French companies must accept electronic invoices.
- January 1, 2025: French medium-sized companies are obliged to send their invoices only electronically.
- January 1, 2026: the 150,000 SMEs and 3.8 million microenterprises must send their invoices only electronically.
The "e-reporting" obligations follow the same schedule: all domestic and international invoices, B2C invoices and collection will be reported via a dematerialization platform partner of the administration (such as our dedicated invoice dematerialization solutions) or on the public invoicing portal Chorus Pro.
Generix Group helps you generate electronic invoices
Don't wait until 2024 to take advantage of the benefits of dematerialization of invoices: equipped with the right tools, you will boost your exchanges with companies and the administration, and you will gain in productivity!
Generix Invoice Services enables you to collect and distribute your invoice data, create and store tax originals, and digitize exchanges and payments with your partners. This tax-compliant dematerialization service for invoices supports all authorized channels: structured files, signed files, reliable audit trail.
