standard
EU VAT Information Exchange System, described in the source as the only authority on whether an intra-EU VAT number is valid today.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
EU B2B SaaS sellers should re-check a customer's VAT ID at every renewal, a vatnode.dev post argues, because each invoice is a new supply. It hooks the check to the renewal event and sends failures to a person, since a VIES miss can mean an outage.
Reality
The European Commission's VAT status endpoint answers only in the present tense and stores nothing, so one operator started keeping every sample. Five days of history is enough to show the member states do not fail together.
Reality
Running the lookup is trivial. The work is deciding which lifecycle moments re-run it, and keeping a dated record that still means something six months later.
Reality
A 2019 reissue gave roughly 1.3 million Dutch sole traders new btw-ids. One Node.js validation guide argues the offline mod-11 test every pipeline copied no longer holds for them.
Reality
A dev.to post makes the case for splitting the customer VAT identifier from an append-only log of validation events, each carrying the consultation number it produced.
Reality
Receiving becomes mandatory for VAT-liable French firms on 1 September 2026. The older problem: supplier records carry a SIREN, VAT number and IBAN that nothing has checked against a live authority.
Reality