France e-invoicing 2026 — your date and your exposure

A French ETI issuing 240 B2B invoices a month and running six months past its issuance date is carrying €18,000 of exposure: €15,000 of invoice fines, already at the statutory ceiling, plus €3,000 of e-reporting fines. That is the number the free France E-Invoicing 2026 Penalty & Date Check returns for the default scenario, and it is €3,600 lower than the €21,600 most people reach for with a calculator — because the €15,000 annual cap bites at invoice number 1,000.

The first is reception. Since 1 September 2026, every business registered for VAT in France must be able to receive an electronic invoice — Factur-X, UBL or CII — through a plateforme de dématérialisation partenaire. There is no size waiver. If your suppliers went live and you did not, their invoices are already arriving somewhere you are not looking.

The second is issuance, and this is where the size split lives. Grandes entreprises and ETIs had to start issuing electronically on 1 September 2026, the same day as reception. PMEs and TPEs get an extra year: 1 September 2027. Most summaries compress these into one September and pick the wrong one for you — leaving you either panicking a year early or sitting 13 days past a date you thought was next year.

Then the fines, where a chatbot will quietly cost you money.

Failing to issue an invoice electronically when you were required to costs €15 per invoice, capped at €15,000 per year. That cap is the part hand calculations miss. At 240 invoices a month, six months of paper or plain PDF is 1,440 invoices, which multiplies out to €21,600 — except you reach the ceiling at invoice 1,000, in month five. The tool shows both: the capped €15,000 you owe and the €6,600 of raw exposure above the caps.

E-reporting is the second fine, and its rate changed. The original text set €250 per missed transmission. The 2026 Finance Act raised it to €500, with its own separate €15,000 annual cap. Assistants trained before the change still answer €250, and plenty of published guides have not been updated either. That is a factor-of-two error on a line a finance director is about to put in a board paper, so the extension makes the rate a switch rather than a constant.

Because the two caps are separate, the worst case is €30,000 a year, not €15,000. A grande entreprise at 900 invoices a month, twelve months late with four transmissions a month, sits exactly there: both fines pinned, €156,000 of raw exposure above them, 136 days past its issuance date. A PME at 40 invoices a month, three months late at the old €250 rate, and already able to receive, comes out at €3,300 with 352 days still on the clock. Same tool, same seven inputs, answers that are not in the same order of magnitude.

The calculation is free, unlimited, and runs entirely inside the browser — in the extension popup and on a single web page that uses the identical tool.js. Nothing about your invoice volume leaves your machine. There is no watermark, no run counter and no locked answer.

What the $60 licence key adds sits on a different axis: keeping and repeating. CSV export writes the inputs, both fines, both caps and both dates to a row you can send to your expert-comptable, and a browser alarm puts your issuance date — most usefully 1 September 2027 — somewhere it will interrupt you. A French expert-comptable bills roughly €100 to €250 an hour for advisory work according to 2026 fee guides, and a readiness review is not a one-hour job.

The dates are fixed and public. The arithmetic between them is where the money is.