Checking VAT IDs

A check validates one VAT or business ID against an official registry. You can start it from the dashboard, the API, or a schedule — the flow and the stored outcome are always the same.

Three objects are involved in every check:

flowchart LR
    TI["Tax Identifier
the stored ID"]
    VR["Validation Request
a check in progress"]
    RES["Validation Result
the permanent record"]
    SCH["Schedule"]

    TI --> VR
    VR --> RES
    SCH --> VR
    RES --> TI

• Tax Identifier — the stored, de-duplicated ID itself. It is created automatically the first time you check an ID and acts as the hub for that ID’s history, schedules, and exports. See Tax Identifiers below.
• Validation Request — a check in progress. Requests are transient: once a check completes (or is cancelled), the request disappears and only the result remains. Open requests are shown on the Overview page and on the identifier’s detail page.
• Validation Result — the permanent, audit-ready record of a completed check, including the registry’s raw response. See Results, Evidence & Reports.

Every check is metered when the request is created — an unreachable registry or a manual review does not consume a second validation.

Start a single check from VAT Checker → Overview → New validation (or from an identifier’s detail page, which pre-fills the ID). Batches are available via the API.

Add address details (optional) enables address matching:

Advanced options:

If your plan includes scheduled validation, the modal also offers “Repeat this validation on a schedule” — this creates a schedule (monthly, quarterly, or yearly) for the same ID in one step.

Via the API you can additionally attach customer metadata: up to 20 key/value pairs (keys 1–64 characters, a-z0-9_-; values up to 512 characters) stored with the request and result.

The 2-letter country code determines the scheme — which normalization applies and which registry can answer:

Schemes without an automatic source can still be stored and checked — the request goes to manual review (or completes as Not supported if manual-review fallback is disabled).

Each automatic check is answered by one provider. All registry calls time out after 10 seconds and store the registry’s raw response as evidence.

A request moves through these statuses:

Retries: when a registry is down, times out, rate-limits, or errors, the check retries automatically up to 5 attempts with increasing backoff — after 1, 5, 15, 60, and 240 minutes. A check stuck in Processing for more than 5 minutes (e.g. a crashed worker) is safely re-queued.

When all retries fail (or the scheme has no automatic provider):

• with “Send to manual review when an automatic validation fails” enabled (the default, see Settings) the request moves to the Manual Review Queue and notifies your recipients;
• otherwise a result is stored with the failure outcome (e.g. Source unavailable), so the attempt is still on record.

Every completed check produces exactly one of five outcomes:

Alongside the outcome, the result records a provider status — what technically happened at the registry: Success, Invalid input, Source timeout, Source unavailable, Rate limited, Authentication failed, Technical error, Not supported, or Not used (manual results).

If you provide a company name or address, the result includes a match verdict per field — for the company name, the overall address, and each address component (street, postal code, city, region, country):

How verdicts are computed:

• Where the registry itself evaluates matches (VIES qualified checks, BZSt), its verdict is used directly.
• Otherwise your value is compared case-insensitively against the registry’s returned record.
• If the outcome isn’t Valid, all match fields are Unknown.
• The overall address verdict aggregates the field verdicts: any No match ⇒ No match; all evaluated fields matching ⇒ Match; a mix ⇒ Partial match.

Every ID you check is stored once under VAT Checker → Tax Identifiers — the same ID checked five times is one identifier with five results.

On an identifier’s detail page you can:

• Start a new validation or record a result for this ID (pre-filled).
• See the latest result, any open requests, the full result history, and whether a schedule is active.
• Give the identifier a name (max. 128 characters) and description (max. 1,024 characters) — the name appears in the identifiers list.
• Export data (ZIP) — a combined report over all of this ID’s checks (plan feature, see Results).
• Delete the identifier — this permanently removes the identifier and everything linked to it: requests, results, evidence, and schedules. You must type the ID to confirm.

The number of stored identifiers is a plan limit, shown as a quota badge (e.g. 2 / 500 identifiers) on the Tax Identifiers page.