France, first month: 12 million e-invoices issued, 72% of core target enrolled, rejections near a third
Figures for the first month of the French mandate (1-27 September 2026) put roughly five million businesses enrolled and more than twelve million e-invoices issued. The qualifying numbers matter more than the headline: only about 72% of the four million businesses in the core target population were enrolled, and initial rejection rates were reported to reach 32%. A rejection rate near a third in month one is consistent with what large mandates have produced elsewhere — the failures are overwhelmingly data quality rather than connectivity, typically directory lookup failures, missing or wrong buyer identifiers, and mandatory fields the ERP never had to populate before. For anyone preparing a 2027 go-live elsewhere, the lesson is that enrolment is not readiness, and the rejection path deserves as much build effort as the happy path.