Can your customer receive your e-invoice yet?

An electronic invoice reaches a French customer only if that customer has published an address to receive it, and a company that has not published one is unreachable no matter how the invoice is sent.

Since 1 September 2026 every business in France must be able to receive electronic invoices, and large and mid-size companies must also issue them. The obligation is set out in article 123 of law 2026-103. A tolerance announced by the DGFiP in July 2026 protects businesses acting in good faith that can document their difficulties, which is why a dated record of what you checked, and when, is worth keeping.

The practical difficulty is that being obliged to receive and actually being reachable are different things, and there is no official list a system can read to tell them apart. The public directory of invoicing addresses can be consulted by a person, one company at a time; it cannot be queried by a tool.

Check before the invoice, not after the rejection: the cost of a check is seconds, and the cost of an unreachable customer is a payment cycle.

Four moments account for most checks. When a new customer is onboarded and their file is being set up. Before a first invoice run to a customer you have not billed electronically. When a platform reports a rejection and you need to see what the customer actually publishes. And when a customer file is being cleaned, where the question is which of several hundred accounts are not yet reachable.

A company can also check itself. Publishing an address is done by the platform a business uses, not by the business, so the only way to confirm it worked is to look at what is published.

A check answers whether the company has an address that accepts invoices, what that address is, and which organisation receives at it.

The address is the value your own system needs in order to send, and it is copyable. The operator is the organisation that receives on the customer’s behalf, which is who your platform will be talking to. A company may publish several addresses, so the check also states how many there are and which of them accept an invoice rather than only acknowledgements.

A single check is free and needs no account. Signing in with LinkedIn, also free, adds every address the company publishes with the formats each one accepts, the identity details from the state register, a dated report of the check to keep as evidence, and checks of up to 100 companies at once.

Every fact on the result names the source it came from and the date that source reported, so nothing has to be taken on trust. Nothing you check is stored.