The essentials
- Electronic invoicing covers purchases and sales between businesses established in France and registered for VAT.
- Transactions with individuals or with clients established abroad fall outside electronic invoicing, but their data must be transmitted to the tax administration.
- The same company can therefore be subject to both obligations, depending on the nature of its transactions.
- The preparatory work is identical: know where the sales data lives, who aggregates it, and through which channel it will leave.
A joiner invoices mostly private customers and three companies. An online shop sells in France and in Belgium. An agency invoices French companies and one Swiss client. In all three cases you hear the same sentence: “electronic invoicing is not for us”. That is true for part of their activity. It is wrong for the other part.
Two perimeters, not one
Electronic invoicing covers purchases and sales of goods and services carried out between businesses established in France and registered for VAT. Transactions with individuals or with clients established abroad fall outside that perimeter. One could therefore believe they escape the reform. They escape it through the invoice door, not through the data door: information about those transactions must be transmitted to the tax administration. That is what the official text calls the transmission of transaction data — usually known by its technical name, *e-reporting*.
Direct consequence: a single company can be subject to both obligations, depending on what it sells. A shop with mixed revenue — individuals at the counter, businesses on account — sits exactly in that position.
Again, the subject is the data
A company with one invoicing circuit gets by with a platform and a procedure. A company with three — the till, the online shop, the management software — must first answer one question: where does my sales data actually live, and who aggregates it? In many small structures, the answer sits in a spreadsheet, in the monthly export of a point-of-sale system, and in the head of the person preparing the VAT return.
The trap is believing a single tool will settle both subjects. An approved platform covers the invoice. Transmitting the data of your sales to individuals is a second file, to be handled separately, with its own questions: which system produces the data, in what format, and who checks what leaves.
- List your sales sources, one by one: till, website, marketplace, direct invoicing.
- For each, note who produces the data and where it is kept today.
- Check with each software vendor what they cover: electronic invoicing, data transmission, or both.
If you sell both to individuals and to businesses, and you are not sure which obligation covers what, we can build that table with you — before the subject becomes urgent.
Sources
This note was drafted with AI tools from the cited sources, then reviewed and published under the responsibility of Jordan FOUASSIER, publication director. We summarise the facts and add our reading; source text and images are not reproduced. An error? Write to contact@aigyrosgroup.com.