A French legal unit can trade from more than one address. The national register records each of those sites as its own establishment, and administrations, suppliers, and billing software tell the sites apart with a 14-digit number assigned when the establishment is created.
The number is not a code for the site’s trade or town. The legal unit keeps a single company number. Every shop, plant, warehouse, or office that the register treats as a separate establishment gets its own 14-digit number built on that company number.
How the Fourteen Digits Split
The first nine digits are the Système d’Identification du Répertoire des Entreprises (SIREN) of the legal unit that the establishment belongs to. The national statistics institute says the first eight of those digits have no meaning of their own. The ninth is a control digit that checks the company number. That company number is issued once and is not reused after the legal unit disappears.
The last five digits are the internal classification number. Four of them are an order number given to the establishment. The fourteenth digit is a control digit for the full 14-digit identifier. The institute states that this internal number does not encode the establishment’s activity or location.
| Digits | What They Hold |
| 1 to 9 | Company number of the legal unit. Digits 1 to 8 have no built-in meaning. Digit 9 checks that company number. |
| 10 to 13 | Order number assigned to the establishment. It does not encode activity or place. |
| 14 | Control digit for the full 14-digit identifier. |
What the Register Records
An establishment is a production unit at a particular place. It depends legally on the company, and it is the unit the register uses for a geographic view of activity. Sirene, the computerized register of enterprises and their establishments, covers legal units and establishments in metropolitan France and the listed overseas territories, across legal forms and sectors. Foreign organizations with a representation or an activity in France are included. The statistics institute assigns the company number to the legal unit and the establishment number to each establishment.
Routing an Electronic Invoice to the Right Site
Businesses established in France and subject to Value-Added Tax (VAT) are in scope for the French Electronic Invoice (E-Invoice) reform. France Num describes a duty to receive electronic invoices from 1 September 2026, with issuance covered by the same reform. Invoices move through an approved platform, which also passes the required tax data to the administration.
The public directory, provided by the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP) with the state’s financial IT agency, lists each business in scope, the approved platform that holds its data, and the electronic billing addresses where invoices should go. A supplier’s platform usually starts from the company number, then reads the address lines that buyer has published. A business may use more than one approved platform.
France Num says the buyer chooses one of three reception grains when it declares its connection:
- Company number. Every invoice arrives at the same place.
- Establishment number. Each establishment receives the invoices that concern it. The supplier has to know which establishment placed the order.
- Internal code. A service or unit has its own address, which the supplier also has to know before sending.
The company number is enough only when the buyer has left every invoice on one company-level line. It cannot separate sites, because every establishment of that legal unit shares it. In Business-to-Business (B2B) traffic, a buyer that publishes a directory line per establishment will not get the invoice to the plant, store, or office that ordered unless the file carries that site’s 14-digit number. The head office and another establishment can be separate billing addresses. A file that stops at the company number falls through to the generic line instead of the site that is supposed to process the invoice.
What Billing Systems Should Store
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) customer record should keep the ordering establishment’s 14-digit number beside the company number, the delivery address, and the reception grain the buyer has declared. The purchase order, the receipt, and the invoice then name the same site. If the buyer later adds an internal code under that establishment, the supplier still starts from the right site rather than from every location that shares the company number.
The company number stays the legal-unit key for the directory search and for the invoice. The establishment number is the extra key that makes site-level routing possible. The control digits check that a number was typed completely. They do not identify the trade, the town, or which site in a group placed the order.
