France – Country Profile

National e-Invoicing context

While the Modernization  Law of the French Administration (LME) mandated e-Invoicing reception for the French State (Ministries and related bodies) since the 1st January 2012 , the Simplification law (article 1) voted on October 4th, 2013, mandates all Economic Operators (private sector) to send electronic invoices to the public sector, from January 1st, 2017.

A gradual national eInvoicing roll-out in the public and private sector is expected from 1st January 2017 to 1st January 2020, with the following deadlines:

• By 1st January 2017 for large groups and all Contracting Authorities
• By 1st January 2018 for intermediate size enterprises
• By 1st January 2019 for medium size enterprises
• By 1st January 2020 for small enterprises

E-Invoicing Roadmap

1. Publish the technical specifications for e-invoicing by Q1 2015
2. Setting up a single gateway, developed and managed by AIFE (Agence Informatique des Finances de l’Etat), for service providers through a service layer (SOA) to ensure neutrality regarding technical interoperability but encouraging the choice of standards and overarching infrastructure like PEPPOL to increase interoperability for cross border transactions
3. Integrating the requirements of the EN on e-Invoicing along with PC 434 and CEN BII developments
4. Aligning specifications with the standardisation work

French e-Invoicing portal

CHORUS invoice is the national portal for eInvoicing to the French public sector, which is connected to a PEPPOL Access Point and Service Metadata Publisher, currently operated by SERES.

The new CHORUS PORTAL PRO 2017 (CPP 2017) is currently under development and will be accessible by any service provider.

The platform will provide  a number of notifications to the sender: received, rejected, ongoing, delivered to the buyer, suspended (waiting for attachments), processed to payment etc.

The platform is expected to perform at least three levels of validation.  At a first level, a technical validation will be applied to formats, syntax and cardinality. A second level on the data structure , checking if a field is not empty, existence of a reference to the order, if requested by the buyer, and party identifiers. For routing purposes, it has been decided that every contracting authority will be identified by a National SIRET number (possibly adding an extension for service identifier).

CPP 2017 could be accessed by private and public organisations though EDI, portal, or service providers, meaning that depending on their choice, organisations will be able to access directly the current CHORUS portal or use a service provider. The first option is expected to be offered at zero cost and technologically neutral.

The solution will accept several structured (XML) or unstructured (PDF) formats converting them to common semantic format.

Compliance to the future EN core semantic model, will be ensured, using two basic structured formats (already existing in the current platform) one bound to UBL 2.0 (with potential update to UBL 2.1) and accepting PEPPOL invoices (BIS v.2) received from the European network, another to UN/CEFACT CII CCTS V3.0. Billing profile and credit note is currently being studied.

Contact:
Vincent CASTELLA  – Head of project – AIFE (Agence Informatique Financière de l’Etat)

Email: vincent.castella@finances.gouv.fr

Use of PEPPOL

The following PEPPOL components are in use in France:

• Transport Infrastructure (SMP/Access Point)
• e-Invoicing
• e-Signature Validation Service

Onboarding support to Access Point and SMP providers

Support provided by commercial PEPPOL experts.

Contact point

Technical and general information
Thierry AMADIEU
Email: Thierry.amadieu@amadieu-conseil.eu

Successful pilots

• e-Catalogue: 2 pilots in healthcare with hospitals (UniHA and RESAH Ile de France) material not online but provided on request
• e-Invoicing: CHORUS Invoice (one ongoing pilot with IBM)