Why VATify.eu?

VATify.eu is a service that automatically tracks your business partners, verifying company data on a daily basis and sending out email alerts whenever information changes. It can be used without any passwords to remember and requires no special software installed. See more features...

Did you ever send your products to the wrong address? Filled the paperwork incorrectly? Bought from or sold to a company that no longer exists? One of your smaller suppliers closed down and you never noticed?

It happened to us.

An unexpected complication

VATify.eu was developed from the need to track business partners we are not in contact with very frequently.

In 2013, we needed some spare parts from a Swiss supplier of industrial IT equipment. Since there was no reply to our e-mails and phone calls, we did a quick search online and were surprised by the results: the company went bankrupt six months earlier. The company that was in business for three decades, indeed had some problems with failing revenue, but the final draw was an apparent dispute between the owners.

Since Switzerland is not in the EU, we didn't run VIES checks on the company. All payments were always made in advance, so we never noticed anything unusual. We were not in contact constantly and we made orders a few times per year. Besides, it was one of the better known companies in the industry and we would surely notice if it was in any kind of trouble. Or would we? We follow the industry closely, of course, but appearances can be deceiving.

Trying to learn from this mistake, we started looking for a solution that would help us keep our business partners in check.

About the other providers of such data

We first analyzed what the multitude of existing business data providers have to offer.

These are the problems we found with most of them:

limited to a single country,
providing outdated information,
not automated,
very expensive.

Of course, we first looked at the VIES system and sites providing mass verification through VIES. Unfortunately, they offer no automation and so require company IDs to be uploaded manually every time. Also, Swiss companies can not be verified using VIES.

We checked the providers of business registers next. Results have shown that it is easy to get data for companies from a single country. Providers usually charge from about €1 per day for a business register of a whole country. But the EU alone has 28 member states. We don't do business in every one of these, but the cost of €1500 annually for information about businesses from four smaller states seemed quite high, considering we only wanted to verify a few companies abroad, not a few 100,000 of them.

There is also the question of accuracy. Not all registers offer daily updates. Credit ratings (from e.g. Bisnode or local providers) are usually based on data from the previous fiscal year. For some foreign businesses, credit ratings can be based on even older data, yet costing up to €80 per company report.

Therefore — VATify.eu

We couldn't find a suitable provider, so we automated the process ourselves. VATify.eu is a brainchild of our lead developer and is based on the experience he gained working as a financial data analyst at Thomson Reuters (Refinitiv).

We first covered Slovenia and the VIES system, then expanded to Switzerland, Croatia and so on. The fact that some of our clients were also in need of such a service helped us keep development costs in check.

Today, VATify.eu covers almost all of Europe, tracking your domestic and foreign business partners, on-line stores and contractors. It is used in numerous accounting departments and integrated into CRM and ERP systems.