French e-invoicing in Younium

Overview

French e-invoicing lets a French legal entity issue its posted invoices and credit notes as compliant electronic invoices. Younium builds the electronic invoice from the posted invoice, attaches the invoice PDF, and sends it on to be transmitted and reported to the French tax administration. Younium handles the transmission and the reporting, so you work with invoices as you normally would and Younium takes care of the compliance obligation behind them.

The feature covers both domestic and cross-border sales from one configuration. When your customer is a French business, the invoice is transmitted as a domestic electronic invoice and reported. When your customer is outside France, the transaction is reported instead of being transmitted as an invoice. You do not choose between the two — the destination is determined automatically from your customer's details.

Before you can send anything, the legal entity registers once as a supplier with the French authority. Registration involves an approval step you complete yourself through a link Younium gives you. Once it succeeds, French e-invoicing becomes the legal entity's only electronic delivery channel: posting an invoice sends it automatically, and Younium prevents you from posting an invoice that would not produce a compliant electronic invoice.

How Younium delivers French e-invoicing

France requires businesses to send and report invoices through a platform approved by the French tax authority. Younium delivers French e-invoicing through Invopop, an officially approved Plateforme Agréée under the DGFiP mandate. Invopop transmits your invoices, registers your company in the French directory, and reports the required data to the tax authority on your behalf.

You do not need your own contract or credentials with Invopop. Younium manages the connection, so French e-invoicing is configured entirely within Younium.

You can verify Invopop's approval on the French tax authority's official list of approved platforms, and review their security and compliance posture, including their ISO 27001 certification, in the Invopop Trust Center.

Core concepts

SIREN

The SIREN is the nine-digit French company registration number. You enter it on the French e-invoicing settings, and it becomes the registered identity of your company as a supplier. Younium checks that it is nine digits and that its checksum is valid. Your customers' SIREN numbers are read from the organisation number on their account.

French VAT number

A French VAT number is derived from the SIREN, so for any valid SIREN there is exactly one correct VAT number. If you enter a VAT number that does not match the SIREN it belongs to, Younium tells you rather than letting the invoice be rejected later. If you leave it blank, Younium works it out from the SIREN.

Supplier registration

A one-off process that publishes your legal entity as a supplier to the French authority and on the Peppol network, so it can send and receive electronic invoices. It runs in the background and pauses partway through for you to complete an approval step. Each legal entity registers separately, and only one registration exists at a time.

Domestic and cross-border transactions

A sale to a French business is a domestic transaction: the invoice is transmitted electronically to your customer over the Peppol network and reported. A sale to a customer in any other country is a cross-border transaction: it is reported, but no electronic invoice is transmitted. The classification comes from the country on the customer's invoice address.

Getting set up

French e-invoicing becomes available once all of the following are true.

Until the add-on is enabled, the E-invoicing settings report the feature as unavailable and no settings appear. The legal entity's country determines which e-invoicing rules apply, so a French legal entity gets French e-invoicing and a Polish one gets KSeF.

Your legal entity also needs a complete address — street, city, postal code, and France as the country — because the electronic invoice cannot be issued without it. Younium reports any of these that are missing so you know what to fill in.

Settings

Representative details are only included when all three are filled in.

You also need Attach PDF when posting switched on in your invoice settings. The electronic invoice carries the exact PDF Younium produced when the invoice was posted, so without that setting there is no PDF to send.

Note on changing the SIREN: Once you are registered, the SIREN is locked. Changing it would mean invoices going out under a different identity from the one that was registered. To change it, unregister the legal entity first.

Registering as a supplier

Younium shows you what is still missing before you can register — typically that French e-invoicing is not switched on yet, that the SIREN is missing or invalid, that the VAT number does not match the SIREN, or that the legal entity's country is not France.

Registration then moves through these states:

When registration reaches the approval step, Younium notifies everyone on the legal entity who can view e-invoicing, and shows the approval link on the E-invoicing settings. Registration cannot finish until someone completes that step, and Younium will wait indefinitely for it rather than timing out.

You can only start one registration at a time. If an attempt fails you can start again from a clean state. If the status ever looks out of date, refreshing it re-reads the current state and retrieves the approval link if it has not appeared yet.

Unregistering removes your company from the French directory and the Peppol network, and is only possible once you are registered. If it succeeds, the legal entity returns to not registered and can register again. If it fails, you stay registered and Younium tells you why so you can retry.

Sending invoices

Posting

For a legal entity using French e-invoicing, posting an invoice submits it for e-invoicing automatically, and French e-invoicing becomes the only electronic channel — Younium does not also send the invoice through its other electronic invoice integrations.

Because every invoice must be capable of becoming a compliant electronic invoice, Younium checks the invoice before it is posted and blocks the post if it is not valid, explaining what needs correcting. This means problems surface while you can still fix them, rather than after the invoice is posted.

If an invoice is posted but cannot be sent — for example because registration is not finished — Younium notifies everyone on the legal entity who can view e-invoicing, naming the invoice and the reason, so you can resolve it and send the invoice manually.

Sending and resending manually

You can send an invoice from the invoice itself, and resend one whose earlier attempt failed after correcting the underlying data. Resending an electronic invoice for a French legal entity goes through French e-invoicing rather than the other channels, and always sends the stored invoice PDF.

Each send is recorded as a separate numbered attempt, so an invoice keeps a full history of what was tried and when. Younium prevents a second attempt while one is still in progress.

Following an invoice's progress

Each invoice shows a timeline of its attempts.

Completed and Failed are final. Once an attempt has completed successfully, nothing later changes it.

What must be correct before sending

Younium checks all of the following and reports every problem at once, so you can fix them together rather than one at a time.

Your setup — the add-on enabled, French e-invoicing switched on, the legal entity's country set to France, your supplier registration completed, and Attach PDF when posting switched on in invoice settings.

Your customer — the account must exist and its invoice address must have a country. For French customers, the account's organisation number must be a valid nine-digit SIREN, and if it also carries a French VAT number, that number must match the SIREN. Customers outside France need neither, because the transaction is reported rather than transmitted.

The invoice — a currency must be set, and for a French customer every line's VAT rate must be one of the statutory French rates.

Because a customer outside France is reported rather than invoiced electronically, the SIREN and French VAT rate rules do not apply to them. Their own tax registration number is sent when present but is not yet validated per country.

Statutory VAT rates

For French customers, invoice lines may only use the statutory French VAT rates. Younium rejects anything else before the invoice is posted, naming the rates that need correcting.

A line with no tax at all is treated as exempt, which is permitted.

Invoicing in other currencies

You do not have to invoice in euro. French invoices must report the VAT total in euro, so Younium converts it for you using the same rate the invoice was booked at — which keeps the reported figure consistent with your own accounts.

For this to work, exchange rates need to be available for both the invoice currency and euro against your base currency on the invoice's conversion date. If a rate cannot be found, Younium blocks the send and tells you which currency and date are missing so you can add the rates under Settings > Financial > Currencies, or switch on automatic rate updates.

When something goes wrong

Validation problems reported back to Younium are technical, so Younium translates them into plain guidance about what to correct — for example that the customer's address is incomplete, that a SIREN and VAT number do not match, that invoice lines are missing a quantity or price, or that the totals do not add up. Where several things are wrong, you are shown the most relevant ones together. The full technical detail is retained behind the scenes so Younium support can help if the guidance is not enough.

Younium also recovers on its own from interruptions. If an invoice or a registration stops receiving updates — because a message went missing or a connection dropped — Younium checks its true status periodically and brings it up to date, or marks it as needing to be sent again. You do not need to monitor for this, and a resend never results in the invoice being filed twice.

Current limitations

Connections to other domains

French e-invoicing draws on Invoices for the posted invoice and its stored PDF, Accounts for your customer's registration and tax numbers and addresses, Products & Pricing and Billing for the invoice lines and tax, Platform & Configuration for the legal entity and its address, and Currency & Exchange Rates for reporting VAT in euro.

For a legal entity using French e-invoicing, it replaces Apix, AutoInvoice, and Younium's other electronic invoice channels. It shares the same E-invoicing settings as KSeF, which covers the equivalent obligation for Polish legal entities.