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VAT Number Validation

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The EU provides VIES, a VAT number validation service. It allows to validate the VATIN (value added tax identification number) of businesses in the EU.

Note

The EU VAT number validation service is designed for single, sporadic requests. In case your repeated requests are considered abusive use of the service, your IP address will be blocked for a certain period.

The VAT validation only tells whether a given EU VAT information exists. It does not necessarily prove, however, that the given VAT number actually belongs to the current account.

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management uses this service to check the VAT number of an account. The VAT check can be performed

  • Individually for a single account, using a button on the account page, or
  • For multiple accounts using a scheduled batch job.

Info

Switzerland adheres to certain regulations of the European Economic Area, including the reverse charge procedure. As a precondition, suppliers must specify the buyer's VAT ID. The EU VAT number validation service, however, does not cover Swiss VAT IDs. To check Swiss UIDs, you can use the official UID Register or third-party services like vatstack.

By default, JustOn's VAT validation uses the VAT number as specified in the VATIN field of the account as the source field. You can, however, overwrite this behavior by creating a custom field ON_VATNumber on the Account object. Once this field exists, JustOn uses this field as the source. In order to validate the VAT number, the source field must not be empty.

The result of the VAT validation is written to fields on the Account object:

Field Label Description
VAT Number Valid Selected if the VAT number is valid
VAT Validated Name The name linked to the VAT number
VAT Validated Address The address linked to the VAT number
Last VAT Validation The timestamp of the last validation
Last Successful VAT Validation The timestamp of the last successful validation
Last VAT Validation Error The error message if the last validation was not successful

Be aware of the following validation specifics:

  • If the validation was not successful, only the fields Last VAT Validation and Last VAT Validation Error are updated.
  • The fields VAT Number Valid, VAT Validated Name and VAT Validated Address reflect the result of the last successful validation.
  • Modifying the value in the VAT number source field (VATIN or ON_VATNumber) does not automatically update the VAT validation result fields. JustOn therefore recommends to delete the validation result fields after changing the VAT number.
  • Empty VAT number source fields (VATIN or ON_VATNumber) produce an error on manual VAT number check, prompting the user to specify a value, and make JustOn skip the corresponding accounts on automatic VAT number validation.
  • The name and address linked to a VAT may not be available.
  • If required, you can add the fields to the page layout of the Account object.

JustOn provides the remote site setting CheckVatService, which is required to access the VAT number validation service.

Enabling VAT Number Validation