What is the Public Billing Portal (PPF) for electronic invoicing?

Summary: The Portail Public de Facturation (PPF) is a new public platform created by the French government to complement Chorus Pro. It requires French companies to submit their invoices in electronic format from the start of 2020, particularly for Business to Business (B2B) transactions. PPF has exclusive functions, such as tax data transmission, company directory management and e-reporting. It also shares certain functionalities with other dematerialization platforms (PDP) for managing electronic invoices in France. The PPF accepts only the formats defined by the reform for invoices issued in France.

You may already be familiar with the Chorus Pro portal for electronic invoicing in the public sector. From now on, you'll also be hearing about the Public Invoicing Portal (PPF). Here are the responsibilities of this new public platform, a free service provided by the French government and created as part of the reform of electronic invoicing for Business to Business (B2B) flows* (i.e. between companies).

Public Billing Portal (PPF): definition

The Agence pour l'Informatique Financière de l'État (AIFE) set up the Chorus Pro platform in 2017 to roll out electronic invoicing for flows between companies and the public service. As a result, since early 2020, all French companies must upload their invoices in an electronic format on this portal if they wish to obtain payment.

The French tax authorities are currently working on a new platform to handle the flow of electronic invoices from the B2B sector, inaddition to the existing Chorus Pro invoicing portal.

Exclusive PPF features in France for B2B tax reform

All companies established in France and subject to VAT will have to use the PPF, either directly or indirectly, as part of the reform of electronic invoicing for professionals. This next stage in the reform will make it compulsory to use the Public Invoicing Portal (PPF) for certain operations. Only the PPF will be able to handle :

• Transmission of electronic invoicing data to the tax authorities for inter-company flows;
• Communication of e-reporting to the DGFIP, billing elements that are not required to be in electronic format;
• Management of the company directory used to route invoices to customers.

Functionalities shared by PPF with other dematerialization platforms (PDPs)

In addition, the Public Billing Portal (PPF) is also authorized to carry out some of the operations authorized for Partner Dematerialization Platforms (PDP). For example, it can itself transmit invoices to corporate customers. It can exchange invoices with PDPs. The Public Billing Portal (PPF) enables companies to upload, manage and consult their electronic invoices.

This portal will be limited to issuing invoices to companies based in France, and will only accept invoices in one of the 3 mandatory dematerialized formats defined by the reform, in order to extract the expected invoicing data.