System Integration Consultant, France

Connecting the ERP to an approved e-invoicing platform

Under the French reform, invoices between businesses move onto structured formats exchanged through approved platforms, and certain transaction data has to be reported. Which obligations apply to your company, and when, is for your expert-comptable or tax advisor to confirm. The integration work can start before that, because it depends mostly on data your ERP already holds.

The design covers the full path:

• Outgoing invoices. How the ERP generates invoice data the chosen platform will take, for example Factur-X or another structure it supports, with every mandatory field filled from master data rather than typed by hand.
• Incoming invoices. How supplier invoices arrive from the platform, are matched to purchase orders and receipts and are booked, and what happens to disputed ones.
• Status messages. Rejections, acceptance and payment statuses returned by the platform, and who in finance acts on each.
• Reporting data. Transactions outside the invoice flow, such as certain consumer or cross-border sales, where reporting may apply.

Some ERPs offer a native link to particular platforms; others need a connector or custom API work. I compare the options for your software and the platform you prefer, and I treat public sector invoicing through the government portal as a separate flow to test. The selection angle of the same question is covered on my ERP selection consultant page for France.

Bank exchanges: EBICS, files and statements

French companies exchange payment and statement data with their banks through several channels. Many banks offer EBICS connections for business customers, others expect files uploaded through a web portal, and some companies use a service that gathers statements from several banks at once. The ERP has to fit whichever channel your treasury team uses, and the choice affects security, approvals and how quickly statements arrive.

I design the flows with your treasury contact and the bank's technical documentation:

• SEPA credit transfer files for supplier runs, with approval steps that stay meaningful when files are sent automatically.
• SEPA direct debit collections with mandate data held correctly and rejects routed back.
• Statements imported in a structured format, whether a SEPA standard or an older national format a bank still provides.
• Matching rules that support lettrage, so receipts clear the right customer invoices.

Card and online payments reach the bank through payment providers that deduct their charges before paying out. The specification breaks every payout into customer receipts, provider commissions and refunds, so the bank line and the customer accounts tell the same story. Testing uses real files from each bank before cutover. If the ERP itself is changing, these bank tests become part of the approach set out on my ERP implementation consultant page for France.

Payroll software, the expert-comptable and the ledger

French payroll is complex and usually handled in dedicated payroll software, by the expert-comptable's firm or by an outsourced provider. Declarations to the authorities belong to that payroll process, not to the ERP. What the ERP needs is a clean accounting journal for each pay period.

I design the journal flow with your payroll provider and expert-comptable. The mapping takes each payroll heading, such as gross pay, employer and employee contributions, withholding, net pay and benefits, to the right account and analytic section, by department, site or project where costs are allocated. The payroll software's export options decide the transport: a file, an API or a connector. A control total compares the journal with the payroll summary before posting, and someone named reviews it every period.

The expert-comptable is involved in other flows too. In many French companies the day-to-day entries are made internally and the firm handles the TVA return, year-end entries and annual accounts, often in its own tools. I note what data the firm takes from you, how and how often, and check that the accounting entries export the firm relies on comes out clean after integrations have posted their data. Sensitive personal pay data stays in payroll and only summarized amounts reach the ERP.

Marketplaces, webshops and logistics partners

French brands and distributors often sell through their own webshop and one or more marketplaces while a logistics provider stores and ships the goods. Each partner brings its own order format, timing and settlement rules, and the ERP has to turn all of them into consistent sales, stock movements and accounting entries.

The design begins with item identifiers and ownership. If the webshop, the marketplace listings, the warehouse and the ERP use different codes, every other flow inherits the problem, so I agree one master and a mapping. Prices, stock and product content are assigned to an owning system, and French-language product texts are maintained in one place.

Orders then flow from channels to the ERP and on to the warehouse, shipments and tracking come back, and stock is published at a frequency that suits the sales pace. Marketplaces deserve special attention: they deduct commissions, hold funds on their own cycle and may account for TVA on some sales themselves. Every order, commission, refund and payout is captured as its own entry, which lets finance reconcile and lets the expert-comptable can see who accounted for the tax. Logistics messages for receipts, partial shipments, returns and stock counts are specified from the provider's documentation and tested with its test environment where available.

Choosing the method, proving it and keeping it alive

Integrators in France often arrive with a preferred tool, and that preference is not always wrong. I still compare the options per flow and record why one wins. A standard connector shipped by the ERP or platform publisher comes first if it really covers your cases, including credit notes, partial deliveries and cancellations. Low-code platforms like Make, n8n or Zoho Flow are worth their subscription when many applications share the same customers, items or orders. Bespoke development against each system's API is justified by volume or unusual rules, provided someone is named to maintain it. Scheduled files remain normal for banking and payroll.

Acceptance testing, the recette, is organized around French business cases: an invoice the platform refuses because an identifier is missing, a supplier invoice matched against its order, a returned direct debit, a marketplace refund after the payout, a corrected payroll period. Your finance team and expert-comptable compare samples between systems before anyone signs the acceptance report.

Once live, every flow has an owner on your side who receives its alerts, a limit on automatic retries, a morning check of counts and amounts, and a runbook in English that your team annotates in French. I can review incidents for a while after go-live. Customer master data from the sales side is the subject of my CRM consultant page for France, and the global method on system integration and ERP integration. Other French work is listed on the France overview; delivery is remote, with visits by arrangement.