FEC (Fichier des écritures comptables)

The FEC (fichier des écritures comptables, the accounting entries file) is the file in which a business that keeps its accounts on computer hands every accounting entry of a fiscal year to the French tax administration during a tax audit. Its format is regulated down to the detail: the list of fields, their order, the separator, the file name, and the way dates and amounts are written.

What the FEC Is

The FEC is required by article L47 A of the Livre des procédures fiscales (LPF), the French code of tax procedure, and its format is set by article A47 A-1 of the same code. It holds every entry of a fiscal year, in a form the tax administration can sort and recalculate to check that the accounts match the tax returns. The 18 fields described below are the general case, commercial accounting; the cash-basis regimes for agricultural (BA) and non-commercial (BNC) profits use more.

The 18 Fields

The FEC holds one line per entry line, and its first line carries the field names. The first 18 items of each line are mandatory and must appear in the order set out in section VII of article A47 A-1: a file that arranges them differently does not conform.

The last column of the table follows one example: the customer line of a subscription invoice for €379.00 excluding VAT, €454.80 with VAT at 20%, issued on 15 July 2026 and paid the next day. The values are those of a French file, so they stay in French.

No.	Field	Content	Example
1	`JournalCode`	The code of the journal the entry is posted to: sales, purchases, bank, miscellaneous.	`VE`
2	`JournalLib`	The label of that journal.	`Ventes`
3	`EcritureNum`	The entry number, taken from a continuous sequence. Every line of one entry carries the same number.	`VE000187`
4	`EcritureDate`	The date the entry was posted.	`20260715`
5	`CompteNum`	The general ledger account number, whose first three characters are digits that follow the French chart of accounts (plan comptable général).	`411000`
6	`CompteLib`	The label of that account, as named in the French chart of accounts.	`Clients`
7	`CompAuxNum`	The subsidiary account number — the individual account of a customer or a supplier. Empty when the line has none.	`CUST42`
8	`CompAuxLib`	The label of that subsidiary account. Empty when the line has none.	`John Doe LLC`
9	`PieceRef`	The reference of the supporting document; for a sale, the invoice number.	`FA-0187`
10	`PieceDate`	The date of that supporting document.	`20260715`
11	`EcritureLib`	The label of the entry.	`Premium juillet 2026`
12	`Debit`	The debit amount.	`454,80`
13	`Credit`	The credit amount.	`0,00`
14	`EcritureLet`	The matching code, which pairs lines that settle each other, such as an invoice and the payment that pays it. Empty when not used.	`A`
15	`DateLet`	The date of that matching. Empty when not used.	`20260716`
16	`ValidDate`	The date the entry was validated.	`20260715`
17	`Montantdevise`	The amount in foreign currency. Empty when not used.	(empty: the invoice is in euros)
18	`Idevise`	The identifier of that currency. Empty when not used.	(empty)

Fields 12 and 13 may be replaced by an amount (montant) and a direction (sens). The direction tells which side the line is on and takes only two pairs of values: D for debit and C for credit, or +1 and -1, written with no space between the sign and the digit.

Format Rules

Article A47 A-1 also sets the shape of the file.

Structure: either a flat file, sequential and organised in fields, whose fields are separated by a tab or by the | character, or an XML file that follows the structure of an XSD schema. The field separator is unique and unambiguous throughout the file, and records are separated by a carriage return, a line feed, or both.
File name: SirenFECAAAAMMJJ — the business’s SIREN number, the letters FEC, then the closing date of the fiscal year, written year, month, day.
Dates: in the AAAAMMJJ format — year, month, day — with no separator.
Amounts: a comma separates the whole part from the decimal part, and no thousands separator is accepted. A value may be signed, with the sign either as the first character on the left or as the last character, right of the decimal part.
Character set: ASCII, ISO 8859-15 or UTF-8.

FEC and Factur-X

The two formats are often confused, since both are structured and both concern invoicing. They differ in purpose and in recipient:

Factur-X is an invoice format, exchanged between a seller and its customer: a readable PDF that carries the invoice data in structured form;
the FEC is an accounting file, handed by a business to the tax administration, holding every entry of a fiscal year.

They meet in the accounts: an invoice issued in Factur-X gives rise, at the seller, to an entry in the sales journal, which then appears in the FEC of the fiscal year.

The FEC and ProAbono

A file in the FEC format is produced from the invoices and credit notes issued in ProAbono, in the sales journal. It is not the business’s FEC, which its accounting software produces from all of its journals: it is an import file, whose purpose is to make it easier to bring those entries into the accounting software. Once imported, they become part of the fiscal year’s FEC. Payments are not included.

The file is a CSV that carries the 18 FEC fields, in their order. The fields the accounting software fills in itself on import, such as the entry number, the account label or the validation date, are left empty.

The export is configured to match what the accounting software expects:

the journal code and label;
the general ledger accounts for revenue and for VAT collected;
the customers’ subsidiary accounts;
the decimal separator of amounts.

The file is delivered in the way agreed with the merchant when the export is set up:

by email, every month on a set date — the 2nd or the 3rd, for example — to one or more contacts, each delivery covering the previous month;
or through the ProAbono API, whose route and documentation are provided on request.

The export is available on request from the ProAbono account manager, as List Invoices notes.