Definition
A jewellery maker sells at markets and through her online shop.
She reads everywhere that the invoicing reform covers "exchanges between businesses", notes that she has never invoiced a single company in her life, and closes the tab.
She has just walked past the one half of the reform that targets her, and nobody else.
E-reporting is the transmission to the tax administration of data on the transactions that never travel through the business-to-business invoice circuit.
It covers your sales and services to consumers. It also covers your transactions with clients or suppliers established outside France, and the payment data attached to them.
Where Electronic invoicing moves a document all the way to the client, e-reporting sends up data only, with nothing reaching the buyer.
The transmission still runs through the same pipe as business invoices, namely a Certified invoicing platform (plateforme de dématérialisation partenaire) connected to the administration.
A shop serving only consumers therefore needs the same connection as an agency invoicing only companies, for an entirely different purpose.
€8,000 collected in a quarter: what goes where
Take a graphic designer under the BNC (non-commercial income) rules who collects €8,000 over a quarter, spread across three kinds of client.
| What is collected | Amount | Circuit involved |
|---|---|---|
| Studios and agencies established in France | €5,000 | Electronic invoice |
| Consumers: logos, portraits, invitations | €2,000 | E-reporting |
| One Belgian company | €1,000 | E-reporting |
The €5,000 billed to French professionals travel as invoices.
The remaining €3,000 never travel through the business-to-business electronic invoice circuit, and that gap is exactly what e-reporting fills, Invoicing abroad included.
In cash terms nothing moves. The full €8,000 is declared to URSSAF, the social contributions collection agency, on the basis of its Cash receipt.
It costs €8,000 × 25.6%, that is €2,048 of social contributions at the 2026 rate for non-regulated liberal professions.
That rate covers neither the vocational training contribution nor income tax.
"I issue no invoice to my private customers, so I have nothing to send" is the shortcut that will cost the most.
E-reporting does not depend on an invoice existing, but on the transaction sitting outside the business-to-business circuit: a till receipt, a payment taken through an app, a bank transfer received from an individual all fall within its scope.
And never try to make that data match your Turnover declaration: the latter counts only the sums actually collected during the calendar year, so a December sale paid in January shifts to the following year.
Two totals that differ is the normal situation here, not an error to fix.
Three obligations everyone mixes up
| Obligation | Recipient | What travels |
|---|---|---|
| Electronic invoicing | Your business clients established in France | The invoice itself, platform to platform |
| E-reporting | The tax administration, and it alone | Transaction and payment data |
| Turnover declaration | URSSAF | The amount collected, entered by you |
The VAT exemption scheme (franchise en base de TVA) removes you from none of those three lines.
Staying under the €37,500 services sub-threshold on the previous year's collected revenue, while also staying under €85,000 of total revenue, means that in 2026 you neither charge nor remit VAT; it does not mean you stop sending your transaction data.
That still assumes the current year's revenue does not cross the higher thresholds either, which end the exemption on the very day they are passed.
Paying no VAT is not the same as sitting outside the VAT system, and that distinction is what decides the question here.
The timetable, and the habit to adopt before it
E-reporting follows the timetable for issuing electronic invoices, never the one for receiving them.
For a micro-entrepreneur the date is therefore 1 September 2027, large companies and mid-sized companies having been bound since 1 September 2026.
Do not confuse it with the receiving deadline, which is behind us: receiving electronic invoices has applied to every VAT-taxable business since 1 September 2026, and it asks nothing of you on the e-reporting side.
These dates come from article 91 of the 2024 Finance Act, reproduced identically by the tax administration portal.
The scheme has already been postponed once, from 1 July 2024 to 1 September 2026: this page is up to date as of 8 September 2026 and will be revised whenever it moves.
What depends on no date at all is one habit worth adopting straight away: keeping an Income ledger that already separates money received from French professionals, from consumers and from abroad.
When the day comes, configuring your tool takes an hour instead of forcing you to reopen a whole year of sales.
Frequently asked questions
I only sell to consumers, do I still need a platform connection?
Yes, for two separate reasons.
Your consumer sales data has to travel up through that channel, and your own business suppliers will be sending you their invoices through the very same circuit, which has to land somewhere you can read it.
Does e-reporting replace my turnover declaration?
No, the two live side by side on the same euros.
E-reporting feeds transaction data to the tax administration, while the declaration to URSSAF is what calculates your social contributions on the money you actually collected.
Neither one excuses you from the other.
Do I have to send each sale one by one?
No, this is not a line-by-line data entry exercise: your invoicing or payment tool aggregates the transactions and sends them periodically.
The work sits in labelling the type of customer correctly at the start, not in retyping receipts at the end.
What if I have no French business clients at all?
Then you will have no electronic invoice to issue, but e-reporting will concern you from end to end, since it covers precisely the transactions you are left with: consumers and clients established outside France.
That is exactly where the jewellery maker from the opening stands: the reform asks nothing else of her, but it does ask her that.