French statutory accounts and your group reporting
Your French entity has to keep its books under French rules, and your group needs figures under its own. That is not duplication for its own sake, and it does not have to mean doing the work twice.
What French law requires
A French company keeps its accounting records in euros, in French, under the French chart of accounts. Each year it produces a balance sheet, a profit and loss account and notes, files a tax return package with the administration and deposits its accounts with the commercial court registry. Accounting records must also be capable of being produced in a prescribed electronic format if the tax authorities ask for them.
Where French rules and IFRS part company
- Goodwill is amortised under French rules in most cases, while IFRS tests it for impairment only.
- Development costs are treated differently, and the French option is not the IFRS treatment.
- Leases stay off the French balance sheet in the statutory accounts, which is no longer the case under IFRS.
- Provisions and revenue recognition follow their own French logic, closer to legal form than to the group's economic reading.
How I handle it
The statutory accounts are the legal base and they are never negotiable. On top of them I build a reconciliation to your group's framework, so the same underlying entries feed both. Your head office receives a monthly pack in its own format and its own language, and the French filings happen behind it without anyone chasing them.
The point is that nobody at head office should have to learn French accounting to understand what the French entity is doing.
More for foreign groups
Setting up in France
Your French subsidiary handled end to end: registration, accounting, VAT, payroll and reporting in English.
Branch or subsidiary in France?
What actually separates the two structures, and how the choice is usually made.
French payroll, explained
What a French employee really costs, what the monthly filings involve, and the rules that surprise foreign head offices.
Talk to me about your French reporting
A first conversation, in English, about what your group needs from the French entity.
4 avenue du 11 Novembre
92400 Courbevoie
nasseir@hotmail.fr