Does anyone here have experience of the French government's Chorus Pro payment portal?

[charcinders]

I just need to submit some invoices to a customer but I have literally spent 3 hours swearing at this thing. So far I've successfully created an account, added my company as a "structure" and connected myself to my structure. Now my "Issued invoices" area has been validated, but I'm not seeing any option to submit an invoice.
Help, someone!

 

[Ben Young]

Hey charcinders. Thanks to your post above I've managed to get to the same stage you did in October -- so thanks. The ChorusPro website is the worst thing I've come across in 10 years' working online. If you ever got any further, I suggest you hire yourself as a consultant at an exorbitant rate. I'm now wondering whether I can survive without my French clients.

 

[Ben Young]

Oh my god. You have to log out and then log back in again. Then the headings all appear.

WHY?

 

[charcinders]

Hi Ben, I feel your pain. I did eventually manage to get through it, but I don't remember what the key piece of information was. I'll check my old emails to see if I can find it...

 

[Ben Young]

Thanks! I guess we're not the only two people in the UK trying to sell to French public institutions, so if I ever do manage to get paid I'll probably write a blog post on it (crediting you -- because without your first note above I would have got nowhere at all).

 

[charcinders]

Couldn't find anything specific in emails. From memory, once you've set yourself up as a 'structure' you then have to make a connection to your customer. The key thing I remember is that every entity on there has some sort of code number which you can search for. It was only when I got that number from the customer that I was able to make a connection to them so I could send the invoices.

 

[Ben Young]

Thanks -- I think I have that number so maybe I am on home stretch. And I'll never complain about UK bureaucracy again.

--Thanks a million for your help!

 

[charcinders]

I think it's basically logical, what makes it so difficult is the total lack of help available. A blog about it is a great idea!
I found the part of an email from my customer that helped me:
"you probably need to input "UMR 7260" for the lab (we are the LNSC, but this is the definitive identifier) and use the service code "0839"."
So there were two important codes!

 

[MLN]

Oh dear... Just read this and realised what the French red-tape must look like to the uninitiated. I'm a French Translator, if anyone needs a hand with the local lingo do feel free to PM me, I'll see if I can help.

 

[Ben Young]

Thanks! I might be in touch, though it's not the language so much as the system itself that is killing me. Surely this bloody website must have knocked 50% off France's economy. Or maybe this seems normal in France...

Oh dear... Just read this and realised what the French red-tape must look like to the uninitiated. I'm a French Translator, if anyone needs a hand with the local lingo do feel free to PM me, I'll see if I can help.

 

[Bob Morgan]

Just as an aside, I once had to work with French Fire Codes - Not even the French use them!

 

[elbit]

Has anyone got any further with this? I would really love some help.

I've got to the stage of requesting a connection with the university that i'm trying to invoice but it just keeps getting rejected.

Thanks, David

 

[2JP]

Did you get this sorted, elbit?

This is a lot about the EU's legislation regarding e-invoicing to public organisations. OK for big corporates, not so for the little guys. One confusion is that some people think e-invoicing is emailing a pdf or submitting a pdf through, for example, some onerous online portal while others insist that an e-invoice can only be done using one of a few digital software transfer protocols i.e. you need to subscribe to some special third party software to get somebody else to actually pay you for the work you have done for them! All with the aim to save the public administration money. I've got a new idea: just sack the slackers and get some decent management to make things more efficient.

Fortunately, most public organisations are (some sanity still exists) implementing an annual threshold for this e.g. if you submit fewer than 5 invoices per year to the organisation then you can use pdfs. BUT, increasingly they are creating these onerous online portal interfaces. Such obscure and arcane interfaces would never exist between private companies and their customers; never (well, maybe the giant corporates). But when it comes to having to submit an invoice to a public organisation... It is certainly a disincentive to smaller businesses.

The BS line to the businesses is that it will 'speed up payments' and 'make it easier to receive payments'. Utter lies. We have an invoice submitted on Chorus currently 21 days overdue. To chase it I have to contact the original contact anyway because Chorus Pro is of no help there as far as I can see.

 

[elbit]

I signed up to a PEPPOL based invoice company (free basic version) called B2B Router, so far it looks like it has got through to the French Chorus Pro system and has eventually arrived on the customers system. Not sure whether this has resolved it and am also very, very wary of the security issues with handing out this sort of data to a third party, but with no other option as the Chorus Pro website simply does not work (i'd love to hear of anyone that has got it to work for them) and the customer says that they cannot pay without going down this route. What i have decided to do though is to add a fee on all future invoices for this additional work/cost. I mean if they want to make things like this then someone has to pay.

 

[jimfoxy]

I can upload and submit pdf invoices but really can't remember how I set it up. I have been paid for the first invoice so it must be working. The payment for my second invoice submitted is late, I guess either because I have done something wrong or I hope it is because the end user did not log 'goods received' on their purchasing system. I have notes mentioning a SIRET number, a commitment order number and a service code. I am still not sure how to indicate on the interface that VAT has not been charged for intracommunity transfers (won't have to worry about that much longer). My experience of these online payment interfaces is that they are designed for national suppliers and international suppliers are an afterthought or not a thought at all.

As you mention, I have been tempted to add an 'admin' charge for these government/federal/public funded organisations whose higher management have chosen to make life significantly harder for the supplier in order to, apparently, save themselves money on admin (is it because their employees are so incompetent that they cannot type numbers in correctly?). Having to learn and then remember how to use a different interface for each customer just to send them an invoice is time consuming and invites problems requiring uphill struggles to solve.

Thanks for mentioning the free PEPPOL service provider.

 

[elephant_94105]

Hey Charcinders,

It's a painful endeavor for sure. Their documentation is outdated. It's not trivial. PM me if you are stuck developing a technical solution at a specific point as any broad stroke answer can't really help I'm afraid.

We have built a ChorusPro module for the open source CMS (with membership system, there is also a plugin for Moodle avail), CART, and CRM.