When people talk about the French e-invoicing reform, they mostly talk about sending invoices to a Plateforme Agréée (PA, the certified e-invoicing platform). That is the most visible part, and often the easiest. Compliance asks for much more: produce a correct document, check it, send it, follow its lifecycle, correct what is rejected or refused, declare what falls under e-reporting, and be able to show it.
Three audiences then ask different questions:
- IT: did everything go through? what is still stuck, and why?
- Accounting: which invoices are waiting for a credit note or a corrective invoice? what is not declared yet?
- Auditors: which controls are in place, with which rules, and who can do what?
NomaUBL answers with two reports generated in one click, as PDF or Markdown, in French or English.
| Audit report | Implementation report | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | What happened over the period? | How is the system set up to do it? |
| Source | The NomaUBL tables (the platform is not queried) | The instance’s configuration and database, secrets masked |
| For | Accounting, management, IT, auditors | IT, project lead, auditors, support |
| When | Every month, every quarter, at closing | At go-live, at each release, at each promotion |
The audit report: what really happened in a period
The report covers a chosen period and compares it with the previous one. It does not list invoices: it gives the figures, explains them and says what needs an action. Every table comes with a reading note.
Its sections:
- Summary and findings — invoices processed, deposited, approved, refused, rejected, in error; deposit rate, first-pass validation rate, delays from creation to deposit and from deposit to the buyer’s first status; then the findings written in plain words.
- Volumes — per day, activity, company, document, transaction type (B2B, B2G, B2C, international) and VAT category.
- Situation at generation time — the split by status and by family (terminal, in progress, technical error, business error).
- Backlog, all periods — what still waits for an action, by status and by age.
- Lifecycle and delays — the milestones reached day by day and the median delays.
- Errors and their handling — validation findings by rule, rejections and refusals by reason, send and import failures, share of errors resolved.
- Operations — scheduled jobs, files processed, notifications, e-reporting envelopes.
- Consistency checks — within the NomaUBL tables, and against the ERP (invoices in JD Edwards but missing from NomaUBL, print jobs never integrated).
What it reveals: a real, anonymized example
Here is what the monthly report of an instance in production showed, a few weeks after go-live. Figures are rounded.
- “Deposited” does not mean “received”. About 1 invoice in 20 was deposited on the platform but could not be transmitted: the customer is registered with no platform. The invoice is valid, but it must be delivered through another channel. Without the report, these invoices look sent.
- A send failure often comes from the platform, not the invoice. Nearly 16 % of send attempts failed because the platform was saturated or unavailable (HTTP 429, 503). Automatic retries absorbed them, but the figure measures your PA’s availability — a concrete argument with the provider.
- Output quality is good; errors concentrate. Over 99 % of invoices passed validation the first time. The remaining blocking errors were almost all on a handful of rules: the buyer’s SIREN, SIRET and electronic address. In other words, on customer master data, not on the mapping.
- A refusal or rejection calls for an accounting action. The report counts refused or rejected invoices with no follow-up and not yet reviewed: each needs an internal credit note or a corrective invoice. That is accounting’s work list.
- E-reporting can fail silently. A single envelope that failed validation covered several thousand B2C transactions: until it is corrected and filed again, they are not declared.
- Consistency checks find what nobody looks for. Here, VAT breakdown lines carrying an amount without a rate, and about a hundred invoices present in the ERP but never integrated into NomaUBL.
None of these points is visible when looking at invoices one by one. They show up when you look at the whole period.
The implementation report: the system as it really is
The second report documents the instance itself, straight from its configuration and database. It replaces the architecture document written once at go-live and never updated.
It contains, among other things:
- the architecture: enabled flows, sending, status polls, e-reporting, directory, scheduled jobs, connectors;
- the built-in rules: invoice lifecycle, protection of deposited invoices (what can still be corrected and resent, and what cannot), reprocessing, integrity and lifecycle-ordering checks;
- the status reference of the French XP Z12-014 standard, with what the seller must do for each status;
- each document: source, transformation files, and the mapping from source field to EN 16931 business term (BT);
- the validation packs applied and their versions (XSD, EN 16931, extended French CTC, French rules, Chorus Pro);
- the per-company settings of the platform, e-reporting and directory;
- operations: scheduled jobs, watched folders, notification rules and the actions they trigger in the ERP, integrity checks;
- security: authentication, roles and users;
- in appendices, every configuration key (passwords and keys masked) and the API reference.
For IT, it is a run book and handover file that is always up to date. For an auditor, it is evidence of the controls: which rules are applied, in which version, how each piece of data is produced, who has access to what. Generated at each release and at each configuration promotion, it also keeps track of how the system evolved.
How to use them
- Every month, review the audit report between accounting and IT: the backlog becomes a shared action list.
- At each closing and for the auditors, hand over the period’s audit report together with the implementation report: what happened, and how it is controlled.
- At each release or configuration change, generate a new implementation report and keep it with the previous ones.
Both reports run in the background from the Reports page, and a copy is kept in the environment’s folder. NomaUBL’s AI assistant also uses the audit report’s figures to answer “what is our deposit rate this month?”.
The documentation details every section: audit report and implementation report.
E-invoicing does not stop at sending. What you need to be able to show is that everything after it is tracked, corrected and under control. Let’s talk.
