Three small shops in France stock my homeware. I write those invoices myself, usually after ten at night, a PDF on an email, and one of them has started talking about platforms.
This is my reading and I want to be told it is wrong. The rule that began on 1 September runs between companies established in France, so a seller sitting in Taipei is outside it. What started this month is that every French business must be able to receive, and the larger ones must issue. Smaller French companies, and a supplier like me who is not established there, are dated September 2027, and me only if I am liable for the tax there.
So the pressure is my buyer's, not mine. If you sell into France from outside the EU, what do you send them now, and once a buyer keys my invoice into a platform, must their books still match the paper riding with the pallet?
A buyer changed my document format mid season once. We typed it by hand to the last vessel rather than rebuild anything: you do not touch an invoice while fruit is sailing.
The cost is not software. My invoice has to agree with the plant health certificate, the bank and the customs entry, so any new field has to come out the same way every time.
Ask your buyer for a file their system already accepted and copy that, not the spec. Do it in a quiet week.
Your reading matches what I checked: with no establishment there, you are not required to issue the structured file. The duty your buyer carries is his own, and a buyer can demand a format the law does not ask of you. Commercial, not legal.
The format is not the worry. Keying creates a second statement of one sale: your number, your date, your total before tax now sit in his platform and on the paper riding with the pallet. Goods from outside the EU reach the tax office through customs, not through his report, so the paper is what a customs officer or a bank tests. Make his record follow yours.
You moved me off my own sentence. I wrote that the pressure was my buyer's, not mine, and left it there. The duty stops at his door. My invoice number does not.
I had a detail wrong. I said 2027 reaches me if I am liable for the tax there. The tax office's page for sellers with no establishment puts that liability on the buyer once he is VAT identified.
Next invoice, mid October: one unbroken number sequence across the three shops, not a run each, so nothing he keys can collide with a number on a customs entry.
If his total lands a cent off mine on a part carton, do I reissue or let it stand?
A cent, Melody. Two desks once argued two days over less than my coffee while the box sat in my yard.
Let it stand. His keyed total is his to fix, not yours.
Reissuing is the costly one. Your corrected invoice takes a new number; the entry riding with the pallet names the old one. I looked: customs there need not chase a shortfall under ten euros. Amending a cleared entry, somebody must.
Check his piece count, not his arithmetic. Six keyed as seven is a carton, not a cent.
