If you’re doing business with another EU country, you’ll need to be able to validate their VAT IDs. It’s a common task in the e-commerce or finance world, and there are two main reasons you want to do it.
There are two main reasons you would want to validate
There are two main reasons you would want to validate a VAT ID. First, you want to ensure the VAT ID exists and is correct before sending an invoice. This will ensure that your customer gets paid properly by their government when they file their VAT return. Second, if the validation fails but you do send an invoice anyway, your customer may be charged back when they send in their tax return because their bank has denied payment due to an invalid or missing VAT number on their invoice.
Validating EU VAT IDs is a common task in the e-commerce or finance world
Validating EU VAT IDs is a common task in the e-commerce or finance world. Many European countries require businesses to register for Value Added Tax (VAT) on sales and imports, and they must provide a valid VAT ID if they sell to customers within the EU. A valid EU VAT ID looks like this: FR889949082315
You can also use the following regex to validate the pattern of a VAT id, when you want to start validating VAT IDs automatically:
/\b[A-z]{2}[0-9]{10}\b/
You want to make sure the VAT ID exists and is correct before sending an invoice with it
You want to ensure the VAT ID exists and is correct before sending an invoice. You don’t want to send out invoices with invalid VAT IDs, nor do you want to lose money on invoices that can’t be paid!
How do you check whether or not a company’s registered?
You can use our [free] service [VAT Registers], which will allow you to search for details of all EU companies that have valid VAT numbers, along with their names, addresses, and more.
You want to prevent fraud by checking that the country code of the provided VAT ID matches the country code of the billing address
You want to prevent fraud by checking that the country code of the provided VAT ID matches the country code of the billing address. The first two digits of a VAT ID are its country code, so this is an easy check.
The first two digits of your billing address will also be your country code, and you can use this information to ensure that they match those provided by the user in their VAT ID request.
You could check against the VIES database, but it will only tell you if there’s a problem. It won’t give you a flag that says yes or no.
If you’re dealing with a European business, it’s good to know that a database called VIES (VAT Information Exchange System) lists all valid VAT IDs.
You can check this database to see if the company’s VAT ID exists, but it won’t tell you if it is correct or incorrect; If you would like to receive more information a VAT ID, you should consider using a vat validation software like vatcheckapi.com.
For example: Let’s say I have a website for my dog grooming business in England, and I want to buy some supplies from an Italian hardware store online.
The merchant offering these products has given me their Italian company’s VAT ID number, address, and other contact information so that I can purchase their goods without paying additional taxes outside of Italy due to Brexit and other trade restrictions between countries in Europe.
When I put this information into my browser while shopping at the hardware store’s website, it comes up with nothing on Google search results—I don’t find anything about where they are located or how long they’ve been around either through social media sites like Twitter or LinkedIn pages belonging to people who work there (This means that both companies exist). So then, what do we do?
To check a VAT ID with vatcheckapi, you have to send over two parameters – the VAT ID and the country code of the billing address (or shipping address).
To check a VAT ID with vatcheckapi, you have to send over two parameters – the VAT ID and the country code of the billing address (or shipping address). If a value is returned, then it’s valid.
Conclusion
I hope that this post has given you insight into how to validate EU VAT IDs. If there are any other tips or tricks we left out, please let us know in the comments below!
