For this guide you will need to have a VAT Sense API Key, you can get a free one at vatsense.com.

VAT Sense is an API that allows you to fetch tax rates and validate tax numbers. Today we'll look at the tax validation functionality.

VAT Number

One of the important things to note is that the VAT number MUST be prefixed with the 2-letter country code. For example, if you're in Germany and you have a tax number of 1048585. Then you would need to send DE1048585.

Consultation Number

In some cases you may need to confirm to your tax authority that you did indeed check the VAT number was valid. For this purpose, there is a consultation number.

To get this consultation number you need to provide your tax id.

Request

VAT Sense uses an HTTP Basic authentication process with a default username of user by your API key as the password.

The HTTP method is GET.

The base URL is https://api.vatsense.com/1.0/validate.

The parameters for the request are:

• vat_number - A required field. This is the VAT Number you want validated.
• requester_vat_number - An optional field. This is your VAT Number. You provide this if you want a Consultation Number.

Response

The VAT Sense API will respond with JSON

{
  "success": true,
  "code": 200,
  "data": {
    "valid": true,
    "company": {
      "vat_number": "288305674",
      "country_code": "GB",
      "company_name": "WEIO LTD",
      "company_address": "142 CROMWELL ROAD\nLONDON\nGREATER LONDON\n\n\nSW7 4EF"
    },
    "consultation_number": "WAPIAAAAXT9mrLue"
  }
}

The consultation_number field is only present if you've provided the requester_vat_number.

Examples

In the below examples, you need to replace {{apiKey}} with the API key you get from vatsense.com.

CURL

curl --request GET \
--url 'https://api.vatsense.com/1.0/validate?vat_number=GB288305674' \
--user 'user:{{apiKey}}'

PHP Curl

<?php
// configure request
$endpoint = 'https://api.vatsense.com/1.0/validate?vat_number=GB288305674';
$apikey = '{{apiKey}}';

// init curl
$ch = curl_init();

// set curl options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $endpoint);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'user:'.$apikey);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

// print response as json
header('Content-Type: application/json');

// print response
print_r($response);

PHP Guzzle/PSR-7

Choose your HTTP Library of choice.

 $client = new Client([
            'auth' => ['user', '{{apiKey}}'],
        ]);

 $url = sprintf('https://api.vatsense.com/1.0/validate?vat_number=%s', $taxId);
 $request = new Request('GET', $url);
 $response = $client->send($request);
 $data = json_decode($response->getBody()->getContents(), true);

Python

import requests

# configure request
endpoint = "https://api.vatsense.com/1.0/validate?vat_number=GB288305674";
apikey = "{{apiKey}}"

# init request
response = requests.get(endpoint, auth=('user', apikey))

# print response
print(response.text)

JavaScript

const axios = require('axios');
       
// configure request
const endpoint = 'https://api.vatsense.com/1.0/validate?vat_number=GB288305674';
const apikey = '{{apiKey}}';

// init axios request
axios({
    method:'get',
    url: endpoint,
    auth: {
       username: 'user',
       password: apikey
    }
}).then(function (response) {
    // print response
    console.log(JSON.stringify(response));
}).catch(function (error) {
    // print error
    console.log(error);
});

Other option

The other option is that you let BillaBear handle your billing. And then you can use our integration to manage this and many other things.