What the reform changes for your restaurant
From 1 September 2026, your business must be able to receive electronic invoices. No extension is planned on this point: the obligation to receive applies to every VAT-registered business, from a chain of brasseries to a twelve-seat bistro.
The second half of the obligation, issuing invoices, arrives in two stages. Large companies and mid-sized companies must issue invoices in electronic format from September 2026. Small and medium-sized businesses, micro-enterprises included — the category almost every restaurant falls into — have until 1 September 2027.
A third obligation often goes unnoticed, and it is the one that affects you most: e-reporting. A restaurant sells mainly to private individuals. Those sales never generate a business-to-business invoice, but their data will still have to be sent to the tax authorities.
Electronic invoicing: what exactly are we talking about?
The vocabulary around the e-invoicing reform is easy to misread. A scanned invoice, a PDF attached to an email, a photo of a receipt: none of these is an electronic invoice in the legal sense.
An electronic invoice is a structured file
An electronic invoice contains machine-readable data, in a standardised format, sent through an identified channel. The point is that the tax authorities can read a transaction with no human involvement. That is also what makes pre-filled VAT returns possible and helps fight fraud — the two stated aims of the reform.
Three formats are accepted by the national framework: Factur-X, a human-readable PDF carrying an embedded XML file, UBL and CII. In practice, Factur-X is the format most restaurant owners will see, because it still looks and reads like a normal invoice.
The PDF by email is over
Today, your fruit and vegetable supplier probably emails you a PDF. Once the rules take effect, sending it that way is no longer valid: the transmission has to go through an accredited platform. Email will still exist, but it will no longer count as the official channel.
- A paper invoice or a plain PDF will no longer be compliant between VAT-registered businesses
- Issuing and receiving invoices both go through a platform
- Every invoice gets a tracked life cycle: submitted, received, paid, rejected
- Invoicing data is sent to the tax authorities in parallel
The e-invoicing timeline for 2026
Here are the deadlines as they stand in law today. Postponements have been voted through before, notably the one in 2024, so check the current timetable before committing a budget. The September 2026 deadline for receiving invoices, however, has never moved.
| Deadline | Receiving invoices | Issuing invoices | e-reporting |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 September 2026 — large and mid-sized companies | Mandatory | Mandatory | Mandatory |
| 1 September 2026 — SMEs, small businesses, micro-enterprises | Mandatory | No | No |
| 1 September 2027 — SMEs, small businesses, micro-enterprises | Mandatory | Mandatory | Mandatory |
| Restaurant under the VAT exemption scheme | Mandatory | Mandatory in 2027 | Depends on activity |
Read that second row carefully. In September 2026, an independent restaurant does not have to change the way it issues invoices. It does, however, need a valid receiving address, otherwise its suppliers will no longer be able to send it anything at all.
Public invoicing portal and accredited platforms: who does what
The scheme originally rested on two building blocks: the public invoicing portal (PPF) and partner dematerialisation platforms (PDP). The architecture changed along the way, and plenty of articles online are still describing the old version.
The PPF: a directory, not a free service desk
The PPF no longer acts as a free exchange platform for every business in France. Its remit has been narrowed to two functions: maintaining the national directory that routes each invoice to the right recipient, and consolidating the data destined for the tax authorities.
The accredited platform: your mandatory entry point
In practice, every business will have to go through a platform accredited by the tax authorities to issue and receive its invoices. That platform converts your documents into the right format, checks the required details, delivers them to the customer's platform and sends the statuses back to you.
On the ground, most restaurant owners discover they already have a solution: their invoicing software or their accountant has often signed up to a platform on behalf of all their clients. The first move is not to buy — it is to ask.
What does it cost?
There is no universal free service, contrary to what was announced in 2023. Entry-level offers for a small business generally sit between €0 and €30 per month, often already included in accounting, POS or management software you are paying for. That is a ballpark: compare on the number of invoices processed, not on the headline price.
E-reporting: the real issue for restaurants
A restaurant issues very few business-to-business invoices. Its transactions are overwhelmingly sales to private individuals: covers, drinks, takeaway. Those operations fall under e-reporting — the periodic transmission of sales data to the tax authorities.
The principle is simple: you do not send every receipt, you send an aggregate. Total value of transactions, VAT collected by rate, period covered. It goes through a platform, at a frequency that depends on your VAT regime, usually monthly.
- Counter, dine-in and takeaway sales: transaction e-reporting
- Conferences and business meals invoiced to a French company: standard electronic invoicing
- Foreign groups, delivery platforms based outside France: specific e-reporting
- Payments received on services: payment e-reporting
In other words, your till becomes part of the machinery. If it is already NF525-certified and connected to your accounts, most of the work is done. If some of your sales are still recorded in a notebook, that is where the job starts.
The new mandatory details on your invoices
The reform adds four items to the ones you already know. They must appear on the invoices you issue from the date you enter the scheme.
The customer's SIREN number becomes mandatory, which means collecting it before you draw up the invoice. The delivery address must be shown when it differs from the billing address — a common case for caterers. You also have to state the nature of the transaction: supply of goods, supply of services, or both, which happens often in food service. Finally, if you have opted to account for VAT on debits, that option must be stated.
These details are not cosmetic: an incomplete invoice will be rejected by the recipient's platform, and a rejection means a delayed payment.
What to tackle before September
Waiting until 2027 on the grounds that issuing invoices does not concern you yet is the wrong call. Your suppliers switch over in 2026. If you have no working receiving address, your invoices will arrive late, or not at all.
Four actions are enough for most establishments. Check that your SIREN number and contact details are correct in the national directory, through your platform. Ask your accountant which accredited platform they use and whether your file is already linked to it. Check that your POS software can export the sales data required for e-reporting. And fill in the SIREN numbers for your business customers — a tedious job best spread over several weeks.
This lands in the same year as other obligations and changes in the dining room. If you are reviewing your signage and regulatory paperwork anyway, take the chance to deal in one go with everything the rules require you to display in a restaurant. Admin time is won in blocks, not in dribs and drabs.
The link with digitising your dining room
Paperless invoicing pushes in the same direction as digital service: less paper, more clean data. A business whose menu, till and accounts speak the same language will get through this reform without thinking about it.
It is also a chance to measure things. Once sales are structured line by line, you finally know which dish carries your margin and which one ties up the kitchen for nothing. That is the basis of any price review done properly, rather than by gut feel in January.
A digital menu accessible by QR code, like the one QRCODEMENU offers, feeds the same data with no double entry. It is not a legal obligation, simply the logical next step in the shift described in the restaurant trends for 2026.
That leaves the calendar. September 2026 comes round quickly, and the quiet spell after the summer is the right moment to deal with this. Half a day with your accountant costs less than a month of blocked supplier invoices.