From 1 September 2026, business-to-business invoices will no longer travel freely by email or post. Many SMEs believe they have until 2027 to deal with it. That is true for sending their invoices, not for receiving them. That distinction changes the order of priorities.
Open the Yuman e-invoicing configuration manualTwo dates, and both apply to you
The reform is being rolled out in two stages, and that is the source of most of the confusion.
1 September 2026 — receiving. Every company in scope must be able to receive electronic invoices. That means having designated an accredited platform: without one, your suppliers have no address to send their invoices to. This deadline does not depend on your company size.
1 September 2027 — issuing. Micro-enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses must then send their own invoices through the same channel. Large companies and mid-caps are required to do so as early as September 2026.
In other words: if you are an SME, you have an extra year for issuing, but you must be ready to receive by autumn 2026. The DGFiP confirmed this timetable in the practical start-up guide published this summer, explicitly stating that the statutory schedule is maintained.
One scheduling detail is worth anticipating: your largest clients — social housing landlords, property companies, industrial groups, retail chains — often fall into the large-company or mid-cap category. They will therefore be issuing from 2026. If you invoice maintenance work to that type of customer, you will be receiving their credit notes, rebillings and penalties through the new channel well before you have to issue anything yourself.
The channel changes, the underlying rules do not
What changes is the route. Your invoices no longer go straight to your customer: they pass through an operator authorised by the State — an accredited platform — which carries them and reports to the tax authorities. Three things now travel through this channel: your customer invoices, your supplier invoices, and certain events in the life of an invoice, such as receipt of payment.
What does not change are the substantive rules. The DGFiP states it plainly: the reform changes how invoices are transmitted, not the rules governing the existence of the transaction, the trade debt, payment, accounting treatment or the right to deduct VAT. An invoice received through another channel during the ramp-up phase must not be rejected on that ground alone.
This clarification is useful, to avoid over-reading the deadline. 1 September 2026 is not a brick wall, it is the start of a transition that the tax administration has explicitly planned to support. Nor is it a reason to wait: the transition benefits those already registered, not those discovering the process in September.
The three sticking points in a maintenance business
In the field, the difficulties almost never come from the technology. They come from the data.
Incomplete customer records. An electronic invoice must identify its recipient with certainty, by its SIRET number. A business customer with no SIRET on file means an invoice that cannot be delivered. In most customer databases, that field has been filled in whenever it was needed — which is to say rarely: someone entered a company name, a billing address, a contact, and moved on. The typical case in maintenance is the multi-site customer. You work on twelve stores, you send the invoice to head office, and you have never needed to distinguish the entity being invoiced from the site being served. Now you will. That is the first task, and the longest one if you leave it late.
Your own company identity. Registration with an accredited platform is checked against the official company register. A SIREN or a registered address that differs from the INSEE record, even by a single word — an unreported move, a street type abbreviated differently — will get the application rejected. Checking your own record before you start saves a round trip of several days.
Supplier invoices left to sit. In the new circuit, doing nothing with a received invoice counts as acceptance. If an invoice is incorrect, it must be explicitly rejected, with a reason chosen from a standardised list. For a maintenance business, where invoices for parts, equipment hire and subcontracting arrive in a continuous stream and often without the technician having confirmed delivery, this means someone actually has to look at them — and not just when preparing payment, three weeks later.
Four actions, in this order
- Check your INSEE record — SIREN and registered address — and identify who in the company is authorised to sign a mandate on its behalf. Usually the managing director or chairman.
- Designate your accredited platform. This is the step everything else depends on, and the only one with an unavoidable lead time: signing the mandate takes a few days.
- Fill in the SIRET numbers of your business customers, starting with those you are invoicing this month rather than the entire file. A good benchmark: the twenty customers who account for most of your recurring revenue.
- Decide who handles incoming supplier invoices, now that silence means agreement. Name a person and a frequency, not a principle.
What Yuman takes care of
If you invoice from Yuman, transmission goes through our partner accredited platform: no software to install, no technical format to produce, and you carry on creating your invoices exactly as you do today.
Only one step is down to you, and it is done directly in your account settings in about ten minutes: registering your company. The process asks how you receive your supplier invoices, verifies your company's identity, then sends a signature link to your legal representative. After that, sending an invoice is still one click, and its status — submitted, made available, approved by your customer — is shown on the invoice record. Administrators have received a step-by-step, screen-by-screen guide; if you don't have it, ask.
A few hours now, or a week in September
E-invoicing is not an IT project. It is a clean-up of commercial data that most companies have been putting off for years, and that the deadline simply makes mandatory. Businesses that start now will spend a few hours on it, spread over several weeks, without stopping anything. Those that wait until the last week will discover their incomplete customer records at the exact moment they need to invoice — in other words, at the worst possible time.
A question about your situation: contact support