France Travail Requires Contract Termination Data Within Five Days. The API Delivers It in Seconds.
An employee hands in their resignation on the 15th. Their last day is the 30th. Between those two dates, you manage the transition, redistribute their responsibilities, process their final payroll — and produce five legal documents the French labour code requires at contract end. All of this while still running the business.
Most employers get through it. Most employers spend three evenings on paperwork to do it.
The five documents the law requires
When an employment contract ends in France, the employer must produce five specific documents, each with its own deadline:
The solde de tout compte is the final pay settlement — all remaining salary, unused leave compensation, prorated bonuses, and any applicable severance. It must be provided on the last working day. The certificat de travail confirms the employment period, job title, and final date. French law requires this document immediately at departure, without waiting for the final payslip to be processed. The attestation France Travail — what used to be called the attestation Pôle Emploi — allows the former employee to file for ARE, the Allocation de Retour à l'Emploi, the unemployment benefit they've contributed to throughout their employment. France Travail requires this document, and the DSN termination event confirming it — DSN being the monthly declaration employers file for each employee — within five days of the last working day.
Two more documents complete the set. Reçu pour solde de tout compte is signed by both parties after the solde has been received. Notice of mutuelle portability informs the employee that their complementary health coverage continues for up to twelve months after departure — a legal obligation employers frequently forget.
Every field on the attestation France Travail already exists in your payroll record: employee name, employment period, contract type, termination reason, salary history, working hours, leave taken. Five documents, all drawn from data the system has held for every month of employment.
What the deadline means in practice
France Travail processes approximately 3.5 million ARE applications per year in France. Each one requires an employer attestation before the former employee can file. The five-day deadline exists because ARE eligibility calculations start from the last day of employment — the faster the attestation arrives, the faster the former employee knows whether they're covered, and for how much.
Your former employee earned their unemployment benefits while working for you. The attestation France Travail is your obligation to deliver — not France Travail's to chase.
A plumber in Lyon with three employees typically handles one departure per year. Four and a half hours of documentation spread across two evenings: termination type confirmation, final leave calculation, solde de tout compte, certificat de travail, attestation generation, DSN event filing. The payroll software guides the process — with guided steps, checklists, manual review flags. Each guided step is designed to feel like compliance support. Each manual review step is a reason to stay logged in, stay subscribed, stay dependent.
What payroll software rarely measures is the percentage of filed attestations France Travail accepts without requesting correction. The industry focuses on whether the form is easy to complete. Whether it was completed correctly is a different question.
Where errors happen and what they cost
The costliest termination errors involve termination codes. A démission — resignation — makes the former employee ineligible for ARE in most cases. A rupture conventionnelle — a mutual termination agreement negotiated between employer and employee, homologated by the DREETS (the regional labour administration authority) — preserves ARE eligibility. The termination code in the DSN event determines which outcome France Travail records.
Wrong termination codes, filed within the five-day window, don't generate an immediate error alert. They generate a France Travail recalculation letter weeks later, sometimes months later, addressed to both the employer and the former employee. If the employee received incorrect ARE amounts based on a wrong employer declaration, France Travail can pursue correction. Employers can be held liable for financial losses to a former employee that result from a late or incorrect attestation — an exposure most French employers with staff carry without knowing it.
Net-entreprises.fr — the government platform that receives and validates all DSN declarations — publishes the exact field-by-field specification for termination events. Every field maps directly to the employee record already in your payroll system. The specification exists. The data exists. The gap is software that connects them without requiring you to type everything in by hand.
What happens when it's automated
Liberté generates all five departure documents from the payroll record once the termination is confirmed. The solde de tout compte calculates automatically from the recorded salary, leave balance, and applicable convention collective rules — the sector-specific collective labour agreement that governs employment terms in your industry. The attestation France Travail draws from the employment history already in the record. The DSN termination event files to net-entreprises.fr.
Employers confirm the termination type — resignation, mutual agreement, end of fixed-term contract, dismissal — and review the generated documents. Unusual cases, disputes, or complex termination agreements require judgment that no automation replaces. Liberté handles the standard workflow; the employer handles the exceptions.
A rupture conventionnelle with a complex homologation, a dismissal for serious misconduct, a departure that triggers a collective redundancy process — these are situations where specialist advice is appropriate. The automation makes the standard case take twenty minutes instead of four hours. It also makes exceptions easier to identify, because the standard form is already filled.
Time recovered from a process that shouldn't take this long
Each contract termination documentation process at the current manual average — four hours — represents an evening. For a business with ten departures per year, that's nearly a full working week, every year, producing documents from data already in the payroll system.
France Travail's API receives the termination event, validates the data, and updates the employee's file in near real-time. What takes an employer four hours to produce manually is processed in milliseconds on the receiving end. The bottleneck has never been the government system.
Those evenings don't have to belong to the paperwork.
Free, launching Q2 2026 in France. Join the waitlist at liberte.free.