SAP Business One in France: e-invoicing and the FEC file

SAP Business One runs in France on an official SAP localization. Two things shape the ERP for a French company in 2026: invoices between VAT-registered companies now travel as structured e-invoices through a plateforme agréée, and the tax office can ask for the whole ledger as an FEC file at the start of an audit. This page covers what the localization does, the e-invoicing setup in SAP Business One, the data the French reform adds to every invoice, the FEC file, and a SQL query that finds customer VAT numbers the directory will not match.

I am Zain Abbas, a SAP Business One developer with more than 7 years of SAP B1 work for companies in 13 countries. France is not one of them, so this page is not a case study. It comes from my e-invoicing work on SAP B1 in clearance-model countries, where the ERP data has to be right before a platform accepts it. The French rules come from SAP’s documentation and the DGFiP’s own guides, linked at the end.

What does the France localization of SAP Business One cover?

The localization is chosen when the company database is created and cannot be changed later. SAP’s help for release 10.0 documents these France-specific areas:

How does French e-invoicing work since September 2026?

France chose a decentralised model. There is no free state portal for exchanging invoices between companies. Every company picks a plateforme agréée, a private operator registered by the DGFiP’s Service d’Immatriculation for three years. The platform sends and receives the invoice, converts it to a format the buyer’s platform accepts, extracts the tax data for the administration, and sends e-reporting data for sales that are not e-invoiced and for payments. A “solution compatible” can still help you produce invoices, but it cannot deliver them to another company’s platform.

The calendar, from the DGFiP’s FAQ:

• 1 September 2026: every company subject to VAT and established in France must be able to receive e-invoices. Large companies, mid-sized companies (ETI) and public bodies must issue them.
• 1 September 2027 at the latest: small, medium and micro companies must issue them too, together with e-reporting of transaction and payment data.

An addressing directory (annuaire) run by the state tells the sender’s platform which platform receives for a given SIREN or SIRET. If the customer has not chosen a platform yet, there is no directory entry, the sender’s platform reports the invoice as rejected or undeliverable, and the invoice may go by email or post as an exception.

The DGFiP published a start-up guide on 1 September. Its message is that sanctions will not be applied automatically to companies that hit real, documented difficulties and keep correcting them, while inertia or refusal will be treated differently. It also says this is not a postponement. For an ERP team that means keeping evidence: the invoice, the rejection message, what you changed and when you resent it.

How do you set up e-invoicing for France in SAP Business One?

SAP’s help lists the setup areas. In the order I would do them on a test copy of the company database:

1. Electronic File Manager (Administration > Setup > General > Electronic File Manager). Load the mapping files eDoc Electronic Invoice in France - Marketing Documents (System) and eDoc Electronic Invoice in France - Marketing Documents Import (System).
2. Company Details. On the General tab: street, street number, city, zip code, state, country and email. On the Accounting Data tab: Federal Tax ID 1, Additional ID (the SIRET number) and SIREN No.
3. Document Numbering (Administration > System Initialization > Document Numbering). Tick Digital Series on the primary default series of every document type in the protocol: sales order, A/R invoice, A/R credit memo, A/R down payment, A/P invoice, A/P credit memo, A/P down payment, goods receipt PO and purchase order.
4. Document Settings, Electronic Documents tab. Enable the Electronic invoice in France protocol and set the default eDoc generation type for A/R to Generate. In Processing Target Setup, activate the XML connector and set the EDS export path. In Documents Mapping Determination, add a row for the protocol and choose the mapping file as the export format.
5. Business Partner Master Data. Federal Tax ID in the header, Type of Business set to Company or Government, SIREN No. and Public Directory Status (Active Public Entity or Active Private Entity) on the Accounting tab, Tax subtab, the default generation type on the eDoc tab, and optionally SIRET No., Routing Code and Suffix on the bill-to address.
6. EDS. In the EDS dashboard, select the company database and switch the ConnectorXML-1 connector to active.

Two things from my clearance-model projects apply directly here. First, digital series is a numbering decision, so settle it before the first live invoice: changing series in the middle of a fiscal year leaves a numbering story you have to explain to an auditor. Second, almost every early rejection I have handled was master data, not XML. The platform cannot route an invoice whose customer identifier is wrong, and no mapping file fixes that.

The receiver ID shows why. SAP KBA 3730166, written for SAP ERP and S/4HANA on the same DRC service, lists the four forms DRC builds for a domestic customer: SIREN, SIREN_SIRET, SIREN_SUFFIX and SIREN_SIRET_ROUTINGCODE. Which one you get depends on the business partner data, and the KBA’s symptom is simply that the expected receiver ID is not determined when SIREN, SIRET, suffix, routing code or registration status is missing or wrong. Fill those fields on the bill-to address the way the customer’s directory entry reads, not the way your sales team remembers it.

Which invoice data does the French reform add?

The DGFiP’s FAQ says a French e-invoice carries 34 mandatory structured data points, and four new ones drive routing. This is where each one lives in SAP Business One, as far as SAP’s help documents it:

Where the table says “not named”, I am not guessing a field. Ask your partner or platform which source the mapping uses before go-live, then test a goods invoice, a services invoice and a mixed one.

How do you find customer VAT numbers the directory will not match?

A French intra-EU VAT number is FR, a 2-digit key, then the 9-digit SIREN. For most companies the key is (12 + 3 × (SIREN mod 97)) mod 97, so a SQL query can catch typos in the Federal Tax ID (LicTradNum) before the platform rejects an invoice. It also gives you the SIREN to compare with the SIREN No. field. Run it on French customers that are not frozen:

-- SQL Server: French customers whose VAT number is missing, malformed or has a wrong key
SELECT CardCode, CardName, Vat, SUBSTRING(Vat, 5, 9) AS SirenFromVat, Problem
FROM (
    SELECT B.CardCode, B.CardName, B.Vat,
           CASE
               WHEN B.Vat = '' THEN 'Missing VAT number'
               WHEN B.Vat NOT LIKE 'FR[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
                   THEN 'Not FR + 11 digits'
               WHEN CAST(SUBSTRING(B.Vat, 3, 2) AS INT)
                    <> (12 + 3 * (CAST(SUBSTRING(B.Vat, 5, 9) AS BIGINT) % 97)) % 97
                   THEN 'Key does not match SIREN'
               ELSE 'OK'
           END AS Problem
    FROM (
        SELECT CardCode, CardName,
               UPPER(REPLACE(ISNULL(LicTradNum, ''), ' ', '')) AS Vat
        FROM OCRD
        WHERE CardType = 'C' AND Country = 'FR' AND frozenFor = 'N'
    ) B
) X
WHERE Problem <> 'OK'
ORDER BY Problem, CardCode

-- SAP HANA version
SELECT "CardCode", "CardName", "Vat", SUBSTRING("Vat", 5, 9) AS "SirenFromVat", "Problem"
FROM (
    SELECT B."CardCode", B."CardName", B."Vat",
           CASE
               WHEN B."Vat" = '' THEN 'Missing VAT number'
               WHEN NOT B."Vat" LIKE_REGEXPR '^FR[0-9]{11}$' THEN 'Not FR + 11 digits'
               WHEN TO_INTEGER(SUBSTRING(B."Vat", 3, 2))
                    <> MOD(12 + 3 * MOD(TO_BIGINT(SUBSTRING(B."Vat", 5, 9)), 97), 97)
                   THEN 'Key does not match SIREN'
               ELSE 'OK'
           END AS "Problem"
    FROM (
        SELECT "CardCode", "CardName",
               UPPER(REPLACE(IFNULL("LicTradNum", ''), ' ', '')) AS "Vat"
        FROM OCRD
        WHERE "CardType" = 'C' AND "Country" = 'FR' AND "frozenFor" = 'N'
    ) B
) X
WHERE "Problem" <> 'OK'
ORDER BY "Problem", "CardCode"

Notes from running checks like this:

• Letter keys. A small number of French VAT numbers, mostly for entities without a standard SIREN, have letters in the key. They show up as “Not FR + 11 digits”; check them by hand instead of changing them.
• Country on the BP. The query trusts OCRD.Country. A French customer created with an empty or wrong country is invisible to it, so run a second pass on customers whose LicTradNum starts with FR.
• Vendors too. Change CardType to ‘S’ before you start receiving invoices: inbound invoices are matched to vendors by SIREN as well.
• Then the SIREN field. Once the VAT numbers are clean, compare SirenFromVat with the SIREN No. field on the Accounting tab, and block new documents for a French customer with no SIREN in SBO_SP_TransactionNotification.

The OCRD page lists the business partner fields, and the SQL to HANA converter rewrites other queries.

What is the FEC file and how does SAP Business One produce it?

The Fichier des écritures comptables is the full accounting ledger for a fiscal year as a flat file, in the layout of article A47 A-1 of the Livre des procédures fiscales. A company that keeps computerised accounts hands it over at the start of a tax audit. The standard layout has 18 columns: JournalCode, JournalLib, EcritureNum, EcritureDate, CompteNum, CompteLib, CompAuxNum, CompAuxLib, PieceRef, PieceDate, EcritureLib, Debit, Credit, EcritureLet, DateLet, ValidDate, Montantdevise and Idevise. The file is named after the SIREN and the closing date, as SIRENFECyyyymmdd.

In SAP Business One:

• Where: Reports > Financials > Electronic Reports > FR Audit File 4.0. Set the date range and choose whether to include journal entry lines with zero amounts. Excluding them removes transactions that can cause gaps in the FEC numbering.
• SIRET column: SAP added a 19th column, CodeEtbt, with the SIRET code, and two fields on Company Details > Accounting Data: Company Type and Share Capital Amount (SAP Note 3121615).
• Names at posting time: a later enhancement makes the file show account and business partner names as they were when the journal entry was created, not the current names in the database.

Before handing an FEC to anyone, I would open it next to the trial balance for the same period. Debits and credits per account must match, journal entries must be balanced, and EcritureNum must run without unexplained gaps. Journal entries live in OJDT and their lines in JDT1, so a quick sum of JDT1 by account for the fiscal year is the cross-check.

Which ERP systems are common in France?

Sage is the long-established name in French small and mid-sized companies, with Sage 100 and Sage X3, and Cegid and EBP are the other domestic vendors many accountants know. Companies that belong to an international group, or sell across the EU, more often run SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Odoo or Oracle NetSuite. Under the reform every one of them needs a plateforme agréée, either built in or connected, so the platform choice no longer picks the ERP for you. The ERP Selector compares systems by country requirement.

What can Kodenova do for SAP Business One users in France?

I work remotely from Pakistan, 4 hours ahead of France in winter and 3 in summer. The French working day from 9:00 to 14:00 is my afternoon, so meetings fit without anyone working at night. What I do:

• Master data clean-up before go-live: SIREN, SIRET, VAT numbers, routing codes and directory status, with queries like the one above and a report of what to fix.
• Validation rules in SBO_SP_TransactionNotification: block an A/R invoice for a French customer with no SIREN, or a document on a series that is not digital. See the TransactionNotification examples.
• Integrations through the Service Layer: web shops, CRM, banks and your platform’s API for inbound invoices and statuses. See the Service Layer guide.
• Queries, reports and SQL Server to HANA migration. See the migration guide.
• AI on top of SAP B1: an MCP server so ChatGPT or Claude can answer from live SAP data, with permissions.

To be clear about scope: the e-invoicing integrations I have built are for Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama. For France I am not a plateforme agréée and I do not sell a French e-invoicing connector; I work on the SAP side, next to your platform and your partner’s DRC setup, and I do not give tax advice. Kodenova is not an SAP partner and does not resell licences; if you have a partner for licences and support, I work alongside them on development. Other country pages: Germany, Italy and the full list on the SAP Business One hub.

Sources

• SAP Help Portal: Electronic Invoicing for France (SAP Business One 10.0, Localization for France)
• SAP Help Portal: What's New, Business Partners: Enhancements in Business Partner Master Data for France (10.0 FP 2511)
• SAP Help Portal: Audit File (FEC) (SAP Business One 10.0, Localization for France)
• SAP Help Portal: What's New, Financial Management: Audit File (FEC) Enhancements for France (SIRET in column 19)
• SAP Help Portal: Localization for France (SAP Business One 10.0)
• SAP KBA 3730166: Electronic Invoicing for France: Receiver ID / Endpoint Determination for Domestic Customer Invoices
• impots.gouv.fr: Facturation électronique et plateformes agréées
• impots.gouv.fr: Je passe à la facturation électronique
• DGFiP: Facturation électronique, guide pratique de démarrage au 1er septembre 2026 (PDF)
• DGFiP: Tout savoir sur la facturation électronique, foire aux questions (PDF)
• DGFiP: Facturation électronique, documentation juridique (PDF)

Related services

• SAP Business One development
• E-invoicing integration