Electronic invoicing: can you switch accredited platform? Grégoire Person in Les Echos Entrepreneurs

Grégoire Person, partner at Cyplom Avocats, was interviewed by Les Echos Entrepreneurs on a very practical question, only weeks from the deadline: can a business that has already appointed an accredited platform (PA) switch to another one?

Switching is allowed — the constraint is contractual

The regulations limit neither the number of accredited platforms a business may use nor its ability to change. The real obstacle sits in the contract signed with the operator: some offers include exit conditions or a minimum commitment of up to twelve months.

Termination or indemnity fees may also apply where integration work or bespoke development has been carried out. As Grégoire Person explains in the article, those amounts reflect the technical investment made and are usually spread across the contract term — enough to make some businesses think twice about leaving.

Portability that still needs work

Switching platforms is provided for by the framework, but Grégoire Person notes that in practice it remains imperfect. Transferring an appointment depends on the cooperation of the parties involved, at a time when platforms are concentrating their resources on rolling out their offers and winning new clients. Accounting firms report difficulty getting a response when they seek to recover a client's flows or transfer their appointment. A great deal of thought went into entering the system; far less into leaving it.

The French tax authorities are watching the issue closely, portability being one of the founding principles of the framework: businesses must not become captive to a single operator. According to the details given in the article by the head of the electronic invoicing project at the DGFiP, portability must take effect within five working days. A platform that fails to meet its obligations faces a formal notice and then loss of accreditation, or financial penalties if it does not hand the data and invoices over to the new platform.

Service continuity and archiving: two distinct issues

A service continuity mechanism prevents any break in the handling of invoices already issued: for twelve months, the outgoing platform must continue to collect the statuses of those invoices and keep the business's access to its portal so it can consult them. Payment statuses and lifecycle events therefore remain tracked.

Archiving, by contrast, remains the business's own responsibility. Platforms must allow data to be retrieved, but they are not required to handle invoice retention or to keep history indefinitely. Extracting and archiving invoices must therefore be organised before any change of operator.

What we advise our clients

The message Grégoire Person conveys in the article is one of anticipation: businesses have every interest in assessing now how mature the platform they selected really is. Where there is doubt, it is better to consider switching before the framework becomes general on 1 September than to wait until things grind to a halt.

In practice, that means checking three things in the contract: the remaining commitment period, the financial exit terms, and the arrangements for handing back data and invoices.

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Read Mallory Lalanne's article in Les Echos Entrepreneurs: Link

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Wondering about the accredited platform you selected, or about the exit terms in your contract? Get in touch.