Your TVA Declaration Goes to impots.gouv.fr Through an Intermediary. That Intermediary Sees Your Revenue.
Every month on the 25th — or the 15th if you file quarterly — your TVA declaration goes to the DGFIP (Direction Générale des Finances Publiques, the French tax authority at impots.gouv.fr). Before it gets there, it passes through your accounting software's servers. Your monthly revenue, your tax collected, your deductible TVA — all of it processed by a private company whose business model includes knowing what your business earns.
Most French business owners have filed TVA declarations for years and never thought about this. The accounting software works. The deadline is met. The receipt arrives. What happened in the middle feels like a technical detail. It is not.
The data that moves with your declaration
When your accounting software files your TVA declaration, it processes your total revenue for the period, your output TVA (the tax you collected from customers), your input TVA (the tax you paid to suppliers and can deduct), and the net amount you owe the DGFIP. That is a detailed picture of your business's financial position, processed every month by a company you pay €89 per month to handle your declarations.
EDI (Échange de Données Informatisées — the standardized electronic format used to transmit tax declarations to impots.gouv.fr) is how your filing travels. Your software takes your accounting data, converts it to EDI format, and sends it on. The conversion requires access to your full financial data for the period. There is no technical path where a software intermediary can transmit a TVA declaration without seeing the revenue behind it.
The scale of what intermediaries see
At 800,000 French business customers paying €14-149 per month, Pennylane has monthly revenue visibility across 800,000 French businesses. Not approximate visibility — precise, declaration-grade data on every business's monthly revenue, every month, for the life of the subscription. Sage France, with its 300,000+ customers at €80-200 per month, has the same visibility across a different segment of the French business population.
Revenue data at this scale has value beyond the software service. Accounting software companies see which sectors are growing, which are contracting, what margins look like, and how individual businesses are performing relative to peers. Some of this intelligence can inform the business benchmarking features that appear in higher pricing tiers.
What the EU's privacy rules say about this
GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation — the EU privacy law that applies to every business operating in Europe) includes a data minimization rule: companies should only process the minimum amount of your data that is strictly necessary to do the job you hired them for. If the job is filing your TVA declaration, the strictly necessary data is the declaration itself. What happens with the revenue data beyond transmission is a question each software provider's data processing agreement answers differently.
Read your accounting software's data processing agreement — the document you accepted during onboarding, typically without reading — and find the section on what they process, how long they retain it, and whether they use it for anything beyond filing your declarations. Most agreements are GDPR-compliant in their stated terms. They are not always explicit about secondary uses.
Only 47 companies hold EDIFICAS certification
EDIFICAS is the DGFIP's accreditation for software that files tax declarations directly via EDI on behalf of their customers. Only 47 companies in France currently hold it. Not because the certification is impossible — the technical requirements are published and obtainable. Because it requires engineering investment that only companies with sufficient revenue have historically had reason to make.
Direct EDIFICAS certification means the declaration goes from the certified software's infrastructure directly to impots.gouv.fr. The intermediary visibility is built into the current model — any software without its own certification routes through a certified intermediary, which adds one more company to the chain that processes your revenue data.
The acquisition factor
Cegid acquired EBP in 2024 and Shine (400,000 customers) in late 2025. When a software company is acquired, the customer data — including the filing history — comes with it. Businesses that signed up for Shine's terms are now in Cegid's environment. The data processing agreement that applied at sign-up may have changed, and most customers will not have noticed.
Accounting software acquisitions in France are accelerating. Pennylane's €3.6 billion valuation makes it a candidate for large-scale acquisition by European enterprise software groups. Each acquisition event transfers the historical filing data — years of monthly TVA declarations, revenue history, payroll records — to the acquiring entity's data environment. The privacy terms the customer signed may not be the terms that apply after the acquisition closes.
What arrives in 2026-2027
Chorus Pro — the government platform for B2B e-invoicing — becomes mandatory for all French businesses issuing invoices to other businesses from 2026-2027. This means every business will need to transmit invoices through a Chorus Pro-compatible format, automatically. The invoicing data adds to the revenue picture that accounting software intermediaries already hold.
Each new declaration mandate creates a new data flow through the same intermediary architecture. DSN every month. TVA every month. Invoices via Chorus Pro from 2026-2027. The complete picture of your business's financial position, processed by the same private intermediary, month after month.
Liberté's approach
Liberté is pursuing EDIFICAS certification for direct EDI filing to impots.gouv.fr. Before certification is complete, it will be transparent about which filing paths route through certified intermediaries and which are direct. The goal is the same as with DSN and DPAE: your declaration goes from your environment to the government portal, without a private intermediary processing your financial data as part of the transmission.
Tax declarations should be between your business and the French government. Right now, your accounting software is in the middle of that conversation.
Two questions to ask your current software provider: what do your servers process when my TVA declaration is filed, and what do you do with that data beyond the transmission? The answers are in the data processing agreement. If you cannot find it, ask for it. The GDPR gives you the right.