Depositing French SAS Accounts Through the Guichet Unique: Portal, Deadlines and Signature

One portal, two deadlines, and a signature that commits the company

A French SAS deposits its approved annual accounts through the Guichet unique des formalités des entreprises — the single-window business portal run by the Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) since 1 January 2023. The portal absorbed the old network of Centres de formalités des entreprises and now carries every recurring formality, the annual-accounts deposit among them. The launch was turbulent — technical failures forced a temporary fallback to the infogreffe channel through 2023 and into 2024 — but the framework is now the settled route. What has not changed is the substance: the SAS still draws up and approves the accounts, and it still faces a firm deposit deadline whose length depends on how it files.

This guide covers the deposit through the Guichet unique end to end — the move from the CFE system, the online filing workflow step by step, the documents and format rules, the e-signature routes and the problem they pose for a foreign president, the two-month electronic window against the one-month paper window and the date each runs from, the infogreffe fallback that survives for outages and edge cases, the rejection reasons that eat into a deadline, and the exposure for depositing late. The deposit is the last step of a longer year-end sequence — approval, profit allocation, the dividend clock — set out in our guide to the annual accounts of a French SAS, and this piece picks up where that one leaves off.

The Guichet unique: a single front door to the registries

The Guichet unique was created by the loi PACTE of 22 May 2019 and became the mandatory channel for most corporate formalities on 1 January 2023. Reached at formalites.entreprises.gouv.fr and operated by INPI, it consolidates the functions once spread across the CFE network that sat inside the chambers of commerce, the chambers of trades and URSSAF. For a French SAS it handles incorporation, changes to the registered office, president or capital, bylaws amendments, dissolutions, beneficial-owner declarations and the annual-accounts deposit — the last being one of several formalities the company runs through the portal each year.

The design is a single point of entry that routes each filing to the right downstream administration: the commercial court registry (greffe) for the registry items, the tax authority for the tax items, INSEE for the statistical items, URSSAF for the social items. INPI's role is operational — it runs the portal, receives the filing and routes it — while the substantive processing stays with each administration. The registries remain the repositories of the accounts records; what moved is the user-facing interface, from the registries' infogreffe portal to the Guichet unique. The 2023 launch drew heavy criticism for instability and backlogs, which is why the government authorised a transitional fallback to infogreffe for several formalities; by 2025 routine accounts deposits process reliably through the standard channel.

What changed at the transition from the CFE system

Before 1 January 2023, a French SAS deposited its accounts through the registries' infogreffe portal, with the CFE network handling the social and tax aspects of corporate events. The transition consolidated three things. It unified the interface — one portal for all formalities instead of several. It shifted operational responsibility — INPI runs the front end, the downstream administrations do the substantive processing. And it standardised the documentation — the same form fields, supporting-document categories and workflow apply across every formality and every region, replacing the CFE network's regional patchwork.

For the accounts deposit itself, the substance is unchanged: the company still files the bilan, the compte de résultat, the annexe, the rapport de gestion where it is required, the shareholder decision and the auditor's report where one exists. What changed is the format and the routing — the filing goes in through the Guichet unique, INPI routes it to the competent registry, and the registry processes it into its records. Infogreffe was not retired: it now serves as the public-access interface for third-party searches and extracts, and as a fallback filing channel where the Guichet unique is unavailable or unsuited to a configuration. The two coexist, and the user picks between them by the transaction at hand.

The online deposit, step by step

The standard deposit through the Guichet unique runs in six steps.

• Account and authentication. The filer — the president, the SAS's expert-comptable, or a formaliste acting for the company — signs in through FranceConnect (for a natural person on their own behalf) or a professional identity (for accountants and formalistes). The account links to the SAS's SIREN, opening the company file and its prior filings.
• Selecting the formality. The filer picks « Dépôt des comptes annuels »; the portal pre-fills the SAS's identity from the SIREN records — name, registered office, SIREN/SIRET, activity code, president — for the filer to confirm or correct.
• Financial-year and approval data. The filer enters the financial year filed (start and end), the date of the shareholder decision approving the accounts, and the headline figures (balance-sheet total, turnover, result).
• Uploading the documents. The supporting documents go up in PDF: the bilan, compte de résultat and annexe, the rapport de gestion where required, the shareholder decision, the auditor's report where one exists, and the déclaration de confidentialité where the company opts for it. Non-conforming files are refused at upload.
• Paying the fee. The portal computes the registry fee (around €44 TTC for a standard deposit) and takes payment by card or SEPA debit.
• E-signature and submission. The filer signs electronically — FranceConnect for a natural person, a qualified certificate for an accountant or formaliste — and the portal issues a dated receipt with a reference number.

Two practical points sit around the workflow. The receipt is the company's proof of the deposit date — the date that fixes compliance with the deposit window — and belongs in the corporate-decisions record for the year. And where a technical error blocks a filing (portal down, upload or payment failure), the filer should capture screenshots and timestamps: that record supports a fallback filing or an extension if the outage threatens an on-time deposit, and the Guichet unique's outage communications generally authorise the alternative route while it lasts.

Two months online, one month on paper — from the meeting, not the year-end

The deposit deadline depends on the channel, and the two figures are set out in the Commercial Code's deposit rules. A paper deposit at the competent registry must be made within one month of the shareholder meeting (C. com. Art. L 232-23). An electronic deposit at the Guichet unique may be made within two months of the meeting (Art. A 123-61). The longer electronic window rewards the channel the administration wants companies to use, and in practice it applies to almost every current deposit — the one-month paper window now matters only for the small minority of paper filings, typically where a portal problem or an unusual configuration forces the counter route.

The point that trips companies up is where the clock starts. Both windows run from the date of the shareholder decision approving the accounts, not from the financial-year close. For a calendar-year SAS whose shareholders approve the accounts on 15 May, the electronic deadline is 15 July and the paper deadline 15 June. The approval decision itself has its own upstream timing — the accounts drawn up and put to the shareholders, the auditor's report made available a month before where there is an auditor — which our guide to the annual accounts of a French SAS sets out alongside the nine-month outer limit for paying an approved dividend.

Missing the window is not, in itself, the criminal offence it is sometimes described as. Failing to draw up the inventory and annual accounts is the offence — €9,000 for the president (C. com. Arts. L 242-8 and L 244-1) — but that is a different obligation from the deposit. A late or absent deposit is met instead by an injunction to file, under a daily penalty (astreinte), which the next-but-one section sets out in full. The practical lesson is the same either way: a company that sees a late deposit coming should file as soon as it can rather than wait for the court to act.

Which filing route fits your SAS?

Pick the situation closest to yours — the check shows the channel, the signature route and the deadline that follow.

The document package — and who has to file a rapport de gestion

The standard deposit package goes up as PDF, each file within the portal's technical limits (PDF or PDF/A, a size cap per file, consistent page format). The core is the annual accounts — bilan, compte de résultat and annexe — prepared by the expert-comptable and signed by the president, in the standard French accounting format. Alongside them go the shareholder decision approving the accounts and allocating the result, the auditor's report where the SAS has a commissaire aux comptes, and the déclaration de confidentialité where the company opts to shield all or part of the accounts.

The rapport de gestion is the document most often misjudged. Small companies are exempt from drawing one up (C. com. Art. L 232-1, IV), and the small-company thresholds were raised for financial years opened from 1 January 2024: a company is small — and so exempt — where at the close it does not exceed two of three of a €7.5 million balance-sheet total, €15 million net turnover and 50 employees (Art. D 230-1, 2°, decree 2024-152). These are materially higher than the figures that circulated before, so more SAS now fall inside the exemption. The relief does not reach every company: it is unavailable, whatever the size, to credit, financing, payment and e-money institutions, insurers and the related bodies, companies listed on a regulated market, companies appealing for public donations, and companies whose activity is managing participations or securities (Art. L 123-16-2). And a drafting trap survives the reform — where the bylaws require a rapport de gestion by simple reference, the president must still produce one; the exemption applies only where the clause ties the report to Art. L 232-1 (ANSA, comité juridique, 6 March 2019, n° 19-016). A separate point on scope: the rapport de gestion, even where it exists, is not itself deposited at the registry — it is held at the registered office and made available, not filed with the accounts.

Two format rules catch filers out. Documents must be in French — a group that keeps its accounts in another language for reporting must file the French versions, with a certified translation where a supporting document is not originally in French. And each document should carry the right signature — the president for the accounts, the meeting chair for the shareholder decision, the auditor for the report — whether scanned from a wet-ink original or applied as an e-signature; unsigned documents are refused.

The e-signature — and the foreign-president problem

The Guichet unique needs the filer to authenticate and to sign the filing electronically, by one of two routes. FranceConnect is the route for a natural person filing on their own behalf, authenticating through a linked French identity — typically the tax portal or the health-insurance portal. A qualified e-signature certificate is the route for an expert-comptable or formaliste filing for several clients, issued by a qualified trust-service provider and held on a token or smart card, which authenticates the professional and signs for the company.

The friction point is a foreign president. FranceConnect generally requires a French-issued identity, which a non-resident foreign national may not have. The two workarounds are to appoint a French-resident formaliste or expert-comptable to file under their professional certificate, or to obtain a qualified certificate as a non-resident from a recognised provider on the strength of identity documents. Whichever route is used, the e-signature carries the same legal weight as a wet-ink signature: it commits the signatory to the accuracy and completeness of the filing, and the portal records the signatory's identity, the timestamp and the technical signature data — a verified trail of who filed what, and when, that matters for the company's records and for any later challenge to a deposit.

The infogreffe fallback, and paper as a last resort

Infogreffe was not switched off when the Guichet unique launched. It survives as a fallback filing channel in two situations. During a Guichet unique outage — a server failure, a maintenance window, a broken upload module — the administration typically authorises a temporary fallback to infogreffe for the affected formalities, announced through the portal's own channels and the professional bodies; filers then use infogreffe with the same documents and workflow as before 2023. And some edge-case configurations remain easier to handle on infogreffe — filings the Guichet unique forms do not fully capture, or several simultaneous events combined in one filing — though the range of these narrows as the Guichet unique extends its coverage.

Fully paper filing at the registry counter — printed, wet-ink signed, delivered in person or by registered post — remains available in principle but is rarely used, because of the shorter one-month window and the slower handling. Across all three channels the essentials line up: the registry fee is set by decree and barely varies by channel (about €42.58 TTC at the counter, €44.14 TTC by post in 2026), and the deposit date that fixes compliance is the date of electronic submission for the online routes, or the date of receipt at the counter (or the postmark for registered post) for paper.

The rejection reasons that eat your deadline

The Guichet unique refuses a filing that misses a procedural or technical requirement, and because a rejection resets the clock, a rejection near the end of the window can push the company into a late deposit. The recurring reasons are worth pre-empting: format errors (wrong file type, oversize file, inconsistent page format), refused at upload; missing required documents (no auditor's report where one is due, no shareholder decision); inconsistent figures, where the balance-sheet total, turnover or result keyed into the form do not match the uploaded documents; a mismatched approval date or financial-year period between the form and the documents; an authentication failure (a FranceConnect timeout or an expired certificate); and a confidentiality-declaration mismatch, where the company does not meet the size criteria for the category claimed.

Two things blunt the risk. The portal sends a rejection notice to the account and the linked email naming the reason and the fix, so the filer should watch both closely through a filing period. And because a resubmission counts as a fresh filing dated to the day it is made, the single most effective safeguard is a pre-submission review by a formaliste or expert-comptable who knows the portal — the cost of that review is repaid the first time it avoids a rejection cycle inside a tight window.

Work out your deposit deadline

Enter the date the shareholders approved the accounts and the channel you will use — the calculator returns the deadline and flags where you stand against it today.

A missed deposit: the injunction, the astreinte, the mandataire

The sanction for depositing late — or not at all — is not a criminal fine but an injonction sous astreinte, a court order to file under a mounting daily penalty. The registrar who sees that the accounts have not been deposited may inform the president of the commercial court so that an injunction to file at short notice, under a penalty, can issue (C. com. Art. L 232-24). Beyond that, on the application of any interested party — a shareholder, an employee, a competitor, a creditor — or of the public prosecutor, the president of the court, ruling in référé, can order the president of the SAS to deposit the accounts under a penalty (Art. L 123-5-1). The president of the court may also act of its own motion once informed by the registrar (Art. L 611-2, II): the order gives the legal representative one month from notification to file, under a penalty at a fixed rate, and is not open to appeal (Art. R 611-13).

If the order is obeyed in time, the matter is closed; if it is not, the registrar records the non-deposit and the president of the court can liquidate the penalty and order the director to pay it to the Treasury (Arts. R 611-15 and R 611-16). The court can also summon the director for an account of the company's financial position, and can appoint a mandataire to make the deposit in the director's place (Art. L 123-5-1). The separate criminal exposure that does exist sits earlier in the chain — on the failure to draw up the inventory and annual accounts at all, which carries €9,000 for the president (Arts. L 242-8 and L 244-1) — and it is distinct from the deposit sanction. Our guide to late filing of a French SAS's accounts follows the injunction procedure and its commercial fallout in detail.

Coordinating with the expert-comptable

The expert-comptable is usually the hub of the deposit. The accountant closes the year, makes the adjustments and prepares the bilan, compte de résultat and annexe; the commissaire aux comptes, where there is one, audits and issues the report; the president reviews and signs; the shareholders (or the sole shareholder in a SASU) approve the accounts and allocate the result in a written, signed decision; and the accountant or a formaliste then files through the Guichet unique under a professional certificate, sharing the receipt back to the company's records.

Three coordination points repay attention. Where the SAS opts for confidentiality, the president and the accountant should settle the choice before filing — the declaration is signed by the president and lodged with the accounts, and the company's eligibility for the category should be checked first. The engagement letter should allocate responsibility clearly: the accountant executes the technical filing, but the president stays responsible for the substance of the accounts and for the timely approval — an allocation that matters if a filing is late or wrong. And the receipt, the filed documents and the approval decision all belong in the corporate records; accounting records are kept for at least ten years, and the corporate-side documents for the company's life.

Frequently asked questions about filing SAS accounts at the Guichet unique

This article is for general information only and states French law and administrative practice as published in the sources available at the date shown above. It does not constitute legal or accounting advice. Filing channels, portal rules, fees and thresholds evolve; always verify the current framework and seek qualified advice before depositing a French company's accounts.