You Have Four Government Portal Accounts. The French Government Built One Login to Replace All of Them.
You have four government portal accounts for your business. You use three of them at least once a month. You can never remember which password goes to which one. Here's what nobody told you: the French government solved this problem years ago with a single business identity system. Your accounting software just never connected to it.
The French government built the key. Your accounting software built a door you have to pay to walk through every month. Liberté just uses the original key.
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The portals you're navigating manually every month
Net-entreprises.fr handles your DSN (Déclaration Sociale Nominative — the monthly report every employer must file to URSSAF, the social contributions office, listing employees and payroll). Same portal for the DPAE (Déclaration Préalable à l'Embauche — the pre-hiring declaration that must be filed before a new employee's first hour of work, with a €1,068 fine per missed worker). Also used for DADS (annual payroll summaries).
Impots.gouv.fr handles TVA (VAT) declarations and corporate income tax filings. A separate portal, a separate login, a separate filing calendar.
France Travail (formerly Pôle Emploi) needs notification within five days when an employee leaves. CPAM (the health insurance fund, part of the French national social security system) needs sick leave declarations.
That's four sets of credentials, four separate deadline calendars, and four interfaces to learn — for obligations the government requires every French business to meet.
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The single login the government already built
ProConnect is France's unified business identity system, the equivalent of "Sign in with Google" — but for official government portals. One set of credentials, linked to your SIRET number (the 14-digit ID every French business receives at registration), that works across URSSAF, the tax authority, and most other business portals.
Built and maintained by the same government that runs the portals themselves, ProConnect was created specifically so that small business owners, associations, and freelancers don't have to manage four separate logins to meet their legal obligations. It launched in 2021 and is expanding to cover more portals every year.
Since 2017, net-entreprises.fr has offered a public API for DSN and DPAE filings — an official connection point that any authorized software can use. No manual login required per filing, no password stored, no portal to navigate. One ProConnect authorization, once, and your declarations file automatically on schedule.
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Why your accounting software never mentioned this
Because direct connections mean less reason to pay them.
Software vendors built their government integrations years before ProConnect existed. Their "compliance expertise" — the reason you stay — is partly the complexity of managing these connections on your behalf. A platform that explains how to use ProConnect directly, and connects to government APIs for free, removes a key part of the value proposition those subscriptions sell.
All of this documentation is public. Net-entreprises.fr's API documentation is public. The DSN format specification is a 300-page PDF available for free download. None of this information requires industry knowledge to find — it's the government's published technical infrastructure. Almost no accounting software website links to these documents, because the moment entrepreneurs understand that the infrastructure is free and open, the monthly fees become harder to justify on technical grounds.
Accountants know about ProConnect but rarely mention it for a similar reason: managing portal complexity is part of the service they charge for. When the complexity disappears, the conversation about fees changes.
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A Toulouse restaurateur who switched in 20 minutes
A restaurant owner managing seven employees switched her business's government connections from Cegid to Liberté after learning about ProConnect at a regional chambre de commerce session. She had been paying €140/month for Cegid's government filing features.
Authorization through ProConnect took 12 minutes — the time to log in with her SIRET, confirm her business details, and authorize Liberté as the filing intermediary. Her first DSN filed automatically the following month, received confirmation from net-entreprises.fr, and appeared correctly in her URSSAF account. No consultant required. No data migration.
Monthly fee: zero. The filing is identical.
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France's DSN infrastructure at scale
France's net-entreprises.fr processes over 2 million employer DSN filings per month. Every one of those filings uses the same standardized format — DSN version 3 (the current standard published annually by the GIP-MDS, the government consortium that runs the portal) — regardless of which software submitted it. From URSSAF's perspective, a filing sent from Liberté and one sent from Cegid are identical: same format, same validation process, same record in their system.
DSN filing deadlines: the 5th of each month for companies with 50 or more employees, and the 15th for smaller ones. Missing it triggers URSSAF penalties starting at 1.5% of your monthly payroll for each day late. Connecting to the API through ProConnect ensures those declarations arrive automatically — not because you remembered to log in, but because the system knows the schedule.
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Switching: what it actually involves
Most entrepreneurs ask: "If I switch, will I need to re-register with URSSAF?" No. Your SIRET number stays the same. Your URSSAF employer account stays the same. You authorize Liberté through ProConnect the same way you previously authorized your paid software. The government doesn't care which authorized platform files your DSN — only that it arrives correctly and on time.
Historical data from your previous accounting software requires a separate migration process (exporting your chart of accounts and journal entries). That process is worth planning. The government connections themselves — the part that scared you — are a 10-minute ProConnect authorization.
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After the authorization
On the 5th or 15th, your DSN files automatically. Your DPAE files before each new employee's first day, automatically. Your TVA declaration files on schedule via the EDI protocol (the same standard your current software uses). Confirmation arrives from each portal.
From that point forward, you stop navigating four government portals every month. You stop resetting passwords you forgot between quarterly filings. You stop paying monthly for access to infrastructure the government made free.
That infrastructure was built by the French government. The complexity was never in their portals — it was in the layer private software placed on top of them. One ProConnect authorization removes that layer entirely.