Automation of VAT PL and EU VAT number verification

The VAT whitelist is a register of entrepreneurs that allows checking whether a taxpayer is an active VAT payer and their bank account numbers. Each time before making any payment, it is required to verify if the business partners’ NIP (Taxpayer Identification Number) numbers are active in the National Revenue Administration database (for taxpayers from Poland) and on the VIES website (VAT number verification within the EU). Failure to fulfill this obligation may even result in sanctions for the taxpayer, such as the exclusion of the payment portion that was not made using the correct bank account from tax-deductible costs.

In the accounting departments of many companies, verification meant repetitive work involving mostly manual retrieval of information from two independent sources. This is a very time-consuming task, fraught with the risk of errors. Moreover, the company is wasting the potential of the individuals responsible for these tasks. At AVK, a simple and reliable solution was expected to automate this process and minimize the need for manual intervention. As a result of our collaboration with All for One Poland, a bot was developed to verify Polish and EU VAT numbers.

RunBotics – a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform – was used to automate the process. A development environment was prepared on a remote machine, leveraging the cloud-based RunBotics solution. The developed process consists of a main process and several subprocesses responsible for specific activity steps, such as reading data from a file, verifying VAT numbers against the Polish taxpayer whitelist, checking EU VAT numbers on the VIES website, and entering the results to the data file.

The VAT number verification is currently carried out as follows:

The process begins upon receiving an email with an attached Excel file containing a list of numbers to verify. The bot analyzes the sender’s address to confirm authorization and then downloads the attachment. The next step involves processing the data from the file. The bot opens the Excel attachment, reads the data, and separates the numbers into two groups, creating two separate number lists for verification:

• Polish numbers: identified by the country prefix or the NIP number format,
• EU numbers: identified by EU country codes such as DE, FR, or IT.

Then the verification follows:

• Polish numbers: the bot connects to the Polish VAT taxpayer whitelist API to check the taxpayer’s status and retrieves information about VAT activity,
• EU numbers: the bot uses the VIES website to confirm the VAT number status and verify whether it is active in the VIES system.

The next step is saving the verification results in an additional Excel column and generating an updated Excel file with the verification results.

The final stage is the email response. The bot sends a reply to the sender with the results file attached and a brief summary of the process.

At AVK, a file contains, on average, ca. 130 numbers to be verified. The process is executed twice a month and takes approximately 5 minutes, which means that VAT number verification lasts only 10 minutes now. What is worth highlighting is the 100% accuracy of the process (based on the results provided by the whitelist and VIES API).

Mikołaj Guranowski, Financial Manager, AVK Polska: “Automation of accounting processes using bots is a highly promising direction for optimizing the work of finance departments. Especially during period-end closing or tax reporting periods, the opportunity to save even a few minutes can be incredibly valuable. These saved minutes add up to hours and days – and that translates into tangible financial savings. The accuracy and reliability of the bot allow us to focus on tasks that require more personal involvement and creativity of employees. From the very beginning, our cooperation with All for One was focused and substantive. Based on these initial experiences, I expect bots to be more widely used in the finance department of AVK Group companies in Poland".

The key benefits of using a bot for verifying VAT numbers include:

• automated number verification, twice a month on average,
• time savings,
• reduced workload for employees,
• elimination of human errors,
• freeing up employees’ potential for more creative tasks,
• increased efficiency,
• process scalability.

Examples of using Robotic Process Automation in finance and accounting processes:

• Settlement of payables (entering invoices into the financial accounting system, data validation, payment processing)
• Settlement of receivables (invoice generation, sending invoices to counterparties, payment verification, and receivables collection)
• Posting to accounts and balance reconciliation (data entry into the ERP system, describing data entries, entering electronic documents into the system, transferring data to the HR/payroll system)
• Vendor verification and entering (a whitelist)
• Settlement of tax-deductible costs
• Periodical data posting based on files (fuel cards, settlements of corporate payment cards, etc.),
• Automatic sending of balance requests or generation of balance confirmations for counterparties, based on incoming e-mails
• Performing other sequences of activities related to the month-end closing or year-end closing

AVK Polska, a company belonging to the Danish AVK Group, was established in 1998. It specializes in the production of water and gas transmission fittings, in particular valves, gate valves, and hydrants used in water, sewage, gas, and fire protection systems. The production process includes quality control of purchased raw materials, cleaning, machining, dip or powder coating, assembly, and finally, testing of all finished products. The plant in Pniewy (Greater Poland Voivodeship) is one of the largest producers of fittings in Poland.