E-invoicing: the July 27 decree closes the free-portal option — what your SMB must do before September 1

Two texts published in the Official Journal on July 28, 2026 — Decree n° 2026-677 and an accompanying order, both dated July 27 — close a question that had been left open since the e-invoicing reform was first announced: whether the state’s free public portal, the PPF, would double as a no-cost platform any company could use to send and receive invoices. It will not. The decree confirms that the PPF is now scoped down to two roles only — hosting the central company directory and forwarding transaction data to the tax administration for e-reporting — and drops the idea of Chorus Pro-style free invoice routing entirely. Alongside that, the texts formally retire the term "PDP" (plateforme de dématérialisation partenaire) in favor of "PA" (plateforme agréée, approved platform) — the same private-sector platforms, under a name meant to reflect that they are now the only route in or out.

What the July 27 texts actually change

• →The PPF (portail public de facturation) is no longer positioned as a free channel for issuing or receiving invoices — its role is now limited to the central directory and e-reporting data transmission to the tax authorities.
• →The term "PDP" is replaced by "PA" (plateforme agréée) throughout the regulatory text; the platforms themselves are the same private operators, already numbering around 52 candidates registered ahead of the reform.
• →Approved platforms take on formal ongoing obligations: a surveillance audit report within two years of registration, immediate disclosure of any material change, and transparency on who controls the platform.
• →The size-based calendar is unchanged by these texts: large companies and mid-caps must issue e-invoices from September 1, 2026; SMBs and micro-businesses get until September 1, 2027 for issuance — but every company, of any size, must be able to receive e-invoices through an approved platform from September 1, 2026.

What it means for your SMB

If your business has been planning to wait until 2027 to deal with e-invoicing, this decree does not move that deadline — but it does close a door some SMBs were quietly counting on. The original design left room for a free public option; a small business with no issuance obligation yet could reasonably have assumed it would simply receive its September 2026 invoices through a government-run portal, without signing up anywhere. That option is now explicitly off the table. Reception readiness — being connected to an approved platform capable of receiving a Factur-X, UBL or CII invoice — is due in 23 days, for every company registered in France and subject to VAT, regardless of size. An SMB that has not chosen a platform yet is not selecting from theory anymore: around 52 approved platforms are already candidates for the September 1 rollout, and the choice increasingly needs to account for what the platform also handles downstream — payment reconciliation, accounting exports, regulatory watch.

Before September 1: four concrete checks

• →Confirm you have selected — and are actually connected to — an approved platform (PA) capable of receiving Factur-X, UBL or CII invoices; the free public-portal fallback some were counting on no longer exists in that form.
• →Do not confuse the reception deadline (September 1, 2026, all companies) with the issuance deadline (September 1, 2027, for SMBs and micro-businesses) — the two are governed by different rules and different urgency.
• →If you are a large company or mid-cap already required to issue from September 1, verify your chosen platform meets the new audit and transparency obligations the decree imposes on approved platforms.
• →Keep a dated record of your platform selection and onboarding — it is the difference between a formal notice that goes nowhere and one that escalates into a recurring fine.

Academic research on e-invoicing adoption backs up why this kind of regulatory deadline, more than pure cost logic, is what actually moves SMBs to act. A 2023 study in the Journal of Innovation and Knowledge by Ashish Kumar Tiwari, Zubairu Ramat Marak, Justin Paul and Amol P. Deshpande, Determinants of electronic invoicing technology adoption: Toward managing business information system transformation, identifies regulatory pressure and firm size as stronger predictors of e-invoicing adoption than perceived cost savings alone — smaller firms wait for the deadline to become concrete before moving, which is exactly the dynamic a decree like this one is meant to close off. This is also the kind of shifting, dated compliance detail — a terminology change, a scope reduction on a public tool, a deadline three weeks out — that is easy to miss unless someone is actively reading official publications for your business. A regulatory watch agent tracks precisely this: it reads texts like the July 27 decree the day they are published, flags what changed and by when, and surfaces the deadline before it becomes a formal notice.