Frequently asked questions

Facturette issues compliant Factur-X invoices for Shopify merchants established in France, and files B2B invoices to your plateforme agréée.

This page answers what is usually asked before installing. The getting started guide covers setup step by step, and the documentation describes how the app behaves.

What does Facturette actually do?

Every time an order is paid on your store, Facturette issues an invoice in the Factur-X format: a human-readable PDF carrying an embedded CII EN 16931 XML that accounting software and platforms read. A refund produces a credit note.

Both carry a number from a series that is chronological and unbroken — which French law requires and an ordinary counter does not guarantee.

If your buyer is a French business and you have connected your plateforme agréée, the invoice is filed there. Otherwise it is simply issued and made available to you.

Does Facturette e-mail the invoice to my customer?

No, and that is deliberate. Facturette sends no e-mail, owns no sending domain and signs nothing on your behalf.

Shopify is what writes to your customers, from your own notification templates and your own sender. Facturette puts a link to the invoice on the order, and the app's Envoi au client page gives you the Liquid snippet to paste into the template of your choice — along with exactly where to paste it.

A buyer's link stays valid for 30 days. You can regenerate it at any time from the invoice list, which immediately invalidates the previous one — that is what to do if a link has been forwarded somewhere it should not have been.

How long are my invoices kept?

The document itself — the PDF and the XML — stays downloadable from the app for 30 days, then it is erased.

That is a design decision, not a technical limit. An invoice names and addresses your buyer; keeping it indefinitely would make Facturette a permanent store of personal data that belongs to you. You are the archive: the obligation to retain accounting records (ten years, article L123-22 of the French commercial code) is yours, and your invoices are posted on the Shopify order and exportable as CSV.

What survives beyond the 30 days names nobody: the number, the date, the order reference, the amounts per VAT rate and the document's fingerprint.

Why was my invoice not filed to the platform?

The Plateforme column of the invoice list always gives the reason. The four common ones:

Is a sale to a private individual never filed?

No, and that is correct. The obligation to transmit an invoice through a plateforme agréée (article 289 bis of the French tax code) covers exchanges between French businesses. A sale to a private individual falls under e-reporting: the amounts are declared, not the document, and the buyer is never named.

Facturette does both, and never does both for the same sale — an operation declared twice would be turnover declared twice over, which nothing would report.

How does Facturette know my buyer is a business?

From three sources, in this order:

1. the customer metafield facturette.siren, if it is filled in;
2. the customer's VAT number, Shopify's native field (Tax details) — a French number contains the SIREN, and its check digits are verified;
3. the customer metafield facturette.peppol_address, for a business addressed in the directory under something other than its bare SIREN.

With none of the three, the order is treated as a consumer sale. The app's Plateforme page explains how to create the two metafields.

Do I need an account with a plateforme agréée?

Yes, your own. Facturette does not resell accounts, does not hold one on your behalf and takes on no transmission liability: you create OAuth2 credentials in your own space and paste them into the Plateforme page.

That account is billed by the platform, not by Facturette.

Is a sandbox connection enough?

No. A platform in a test environment accepts deposits and gives them an identifier, but they have no legal value. Facturette shows a sandbox connection as a warning, never as a success.

When does electronic invoicing become mandatory?

• 1 September 2026 — every VAT-liable business must be able to receive an electronic invoice. Large companies and mid-caps start issuing them.
• 1 September 2027 — the obligation to issue extends to small and micro businesses.

So for a modest Shopify merchant, filing an invoice is not yet an obligation, and not doing it is not a breach. What matters today is your business buyer: they cannot deduct VAT on an invoice that does not identify them.

Can I correct an invoice that has already been issued?

Not by editing it: an issued invoice is never edited. Depending on what is wrong, Facturette offers one of two operations from the invoice list, and refuses the one that does not apply.

• Re-file — the document is correct, it simply never went out. Same number, date and content.
• Cancel and replace — the document itself is wrong. Facturette issues a credit note that voids it and a replacement invoice that corrects it, as French tax doctrine requires. You see the before/after before anything is issued.

What happens if I uninstall the app?

Your data is erased at Shopify's request. The invoices already posted on your Shopify orders remain: they are yours. Export the CSV journal before uninstalling if you want to keep the record.

In which language?

The app follows your Shopify admin's language — French or English.

The invoice itself is bilingual French/English in every case. Article 2 of the loi Toubon requires French on an invoice, and its article 4 allows a translation to accompany it: one single form, valid for all your buyers, rather than a document whose language would depend on the customer's nationality.