Questions, answered

VATTY is a pre-submission VAT evidence-control platform for accountants. It takes in your clients’ invoices and receipts, assesses each one against the details HMRC requires on a VAT invoice, checks supplier VAT numbers, and separates the VAT that’s properly supported from the VAT that isn’t.

Where something is missing or inconsistent, it prepares an evidence request for you to review and send, then tracks it through to a reply. Your decision and reasoning are recorded against the receipt, and the whole history carries into a versioned Evidence Pack when you sign the VAT Period off.

Before or alongside your accounting software, not instead of it. Your ledger records the financial entry. VATTY holds the evidence, the issues, the requests and the decisions that justify the VAT treatment behind that entry.

Nothing about how you file has to change. You carry on submitting the way you always have.

Worth being clear about the limits.

• It doesn’t replace your professional judgement
• It doesn’t provide tax advice
• It doesn’t submit VAT returns to HMRC
• It doesn’t guarantee that HMRC will accept any item of evidence

No. VATTY assesses evidence and records decisions. Every assessment is subject to your review, and the VAT treatment remains your professional judgement. VATTY is not affiliated with or endorsed by HMRC.

Four ways, all available today.

• Direct upload. Add a single document, or bring in a whole completed VAT Period in bulk.
• Unique Company inbox. Every Company gets its own forwarding address, so anything sent there lands against the right client.
• Connected client inbox. With your client’s permission, VATTY finds supplier invoices in their mailbox and brings them in automatically.
• Secure evidence links. Ask a client or supplier for a document, and their reply comes back to the right receipt.

VATTY also connects to Xero, matching your evidence against the bills and spend money already in the ledger. Shared folder ingestion from Drive and Dropbox, and further accounting integrations, are on the roadmap.

PDFs and images of receipts, invoices, credit notes, refund documents and supporting VAT evidence. Individually, by drag and drop, in bulk, or as a ZIP batch.

Only supplier invoices and their attachments. Nothing else in the mailbox is read or stored.

Your client grants access themselves rather than handing you anything, and they can switch it off at any time without going through you.

No. Evidence requests reach them by email and they respond through a secure link scoped to that request. What comes back is filed against the relevant receipt automatically. They never need a login and never see anything else in your account.

It extracts the supplier, date, VAT number, totals, currency and reference, then assesses the document against the details HMRC requires on a VAT invoice. Depending on the document and invoice type, that includes supplier name, address and VAT registration number, your client’s name and address, a sequential invoice number, time of supply and date of issue, a description of what was supplied, quantity, unit price and VAT rate per line, the net, VAT and gross totals and the arithmetic between them, and reverse charge or margin scheme references where they apply.

It also runs duplicate detection, a billed-to check and a date-to-period check, each with a confidence level.

Automatically, against HMRC’s VAT number checking service, rather than by eye. Where the name held against a registration differs from the name on the invoice, that’s surfaced as something to look at rather than treated as a failure.

It reflects how reliably a document was read and classified. Low confidence doesn’t mean the invoice is wrong, it means VATTY is less certain about what it extracted, so the item is put in front of you rather than passed through quietly.

Assessment is VATTY’s VAT outcome for the receipt. Status is where that receipt or request currently sits in the workflow. A receipt can have a settled Assessment while its Status is still open, for example where a request has gone out and you’re waiting on a reply.

That the item has an evidence, validation, confidence, calculation or categorisation issue that needs a human decision before you rely on it. It’s a prompt, not a verdict.

Open the receipt. You can correct the fields and re-check, raise a Resolve request for corrected evidence or an explanation, or exclude or reject the item with a note recording why. Whichever you choose, the reasoning is kept with the receipt.

VATTY drafts them. You review and send them.

The wording, the follow-up schedule and the tracking are handled for you, so the work doesn’t sit in anyone’s inbox, but nothing goes to a client or a supplier without you approving it first. Requests are chased on a schedule until they’re resolved, and every step is logged.

The client, when the information is something only they hold, when replacement evidence is needed from them, or when they need to authorise you contacting a supplier. The supplier, when a valid or corrected VAT invoice is needed from them and the client has authorised that contact where it’s required.

It returns into your Resolve and receipt views and can trigger fresh extraction and revalidation. The original document stays linked rather than being replaced, so the before and after are both on the record. You re-check and close the issue when you’re satisfied.

VATTY builds structured supplier records, including VAT registration details, trading-name relationships and the decisions you’ve made before, and applies that history to new transactions. So a supplier you’ve already resolved a question about carries that context forward instead of starting from scratch.

The Portfolio view shows Evidence-backed VAT, VAT at risk, open evidence requests and approaching deadlines across every Company you manage, so you can see which are ready, which need action and where the exposure sits. Portfolio oversight is included in every paid plan.

When the critical items have been reviewed and resolved, or where a warning has been accepted with a documented reason. The Evidence Pack reflects your actual review position rather than an idealised one, so an accepted exception appears as exactly that.

A cover page, the period summary, receipt pages, the original invoice evidence, VATTY’s assessment, the VAT validation proof, the audit trail and the reviewer actions. It’s versioned, so the pack for a signed period stays as it was at sign-off.

Every receipt carries its own history, and each VAT Period produces an Evidence Pack recording what was checked, what was found, what was requested, what came back and the decision you made, with timestamps. You’re not rebuilding the story from old emails and folders.

E-invoicing makes the format of VAT data cleaner and the reporting faster. It doesn’t check whether the underlying VAT treatment is right, and a perfectly structured e-invoice for a non-claimable item still reaches your accounts.

As reporting moves closer to real time, the window for finding evidence problems after the fact gets shorter. VATTY sits before submission, which is where that check has to happen.

No, and no software is approved in that sense for this purpose. VATTY applies HMRC-aligned checks and uses HMRC’s VAT number checking service, but it is not affiliated with or endorsed by HMRC, and it doesn’t submit returns.

Each team member has their own login. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, never in a readable form, and repeated failed sign-ins are throttled and recorded. Two-factor authentication using an authenticator app is available on every account, and sessions are carried in HttpOnly, Secure cookies that JavaScript on the page cannot read.

Because credentials are never shared between team members, the audit log shows who actually changed a receipt, a request, a Company, a VAT Period or an evidence status. Changing a password revokes existing sessions.

Every connection to VATTY is encrypted with TLS, and so is every connection VATTY makes outward, including calls to HMRC, Xero and our other providers.

Uploaded documents are stored in private storage that has no public web address. The only way to retrieve a document is through the application with an authenticated session, or through a signed link that is scoped to one document and expires. Database credentials and integration keys live in server-side configuration, never in the application code or the browser.

Every record in VATTY belongs to exactly one practice, and every read and write in the application is scoped to that practice at the query level. There is no code path that returns another practice’s receipts, suppliers, requests or evidence, and supplier history learned from your decisions stays inside your practice.

Client and supplier evidence links are narrower still: each link is scoped to the single named request it was created for and expires. A recipient sees only what that request needs, never your account or another client’s data.

Your practice team, through their own logins. Clients and suppliers see only the specific request sent to them, through an expiring link, and never need an account.

On our side, access to production systems is restricted to the people who operate the service, is used for support and operations only, and administrative actions are recorded in the same audit log as everything else. We do not sell data, share it with advertisers, or use one practice’s data to serve another.

A short, deliberate list, each for one job.

• Google Gemini API. Reads the uploaded document and extracts the fields, over the paid API whose terms exclude using customer data to train Google’s models.
• HMRC. Supplier VAT numbers are verified against HMRC’s VAT number checking service. Only the VAT number is sent.
• Xero. Only if you connect it, through Xero’s own OAuth consent. You can disconnect at any time and revoke access from inside Xero as well.
• Mailgun. Delivers the emails VATTY sends, such as evidence requests and notifications.

We’ll happily walk your security or compliance team through the full data flow, and a data processing agreement is available on request.

No. VATTY does not train any model on your documents, and neither does its extraction provider: document reading runs over Google’s paid Gemini API, whose terms exclude customer data from model training.

Just as importantly, the VAT decisions themselves are not made by AI. The model reads the paper. The reclaimable, review or blocked outcome is decided by a deterministic rules engine that we wrote, which is why every assessment comes with its working out and produces the same answer for the same document.

Every action on a receipt, request, Company or VAT Period is recorded with who did it and when, whether that was a person or the system. Corrections keep the original document linked rather than replacing it, sign-off locks the period, and the Evidence Pack for a signed period is versioned so it stays exactly as it was at sign-off.

It’s yours. Evidence Packs and exports give you the documents, the assessments and the full history in portable formats at any time, not just at the end. If you close your account we delete your practice’s data on request, and disconnecting an integration or a client mailbox stops collection immediately.

Two retention rules worth knowing: connected client mailboxes are only ever read for supplier invoices and their attachments, and documents run through the example receipt check on our website are deleted automatically after 24 hours.

Per company, not per seat. Your whole team can work in VATTY on every plan at no extra cost. The rate falls in bands as your portfolio grows, and because the bands apply to the companies within them, adding a company never reduces your bill while your average cost per company keeps falling. There’s a full breakdown, and a calculator, on the pricing page.

VAT risk sits with the companies and invoices you process, not with how many people log in. Charging per seat would discourage you from putting the right people on the work.

No. Plans run monthly unless you choose annual billing, which saves 20%. You can move between plans as your portfolio changes.

Not yet. We’re running a controlled pilot with a small number of practices before opening general sign-up. Pricing is published now so there are no surprises later, and pilot practices help shape both the product and the pricing.

Setting up three real Companies and bringing in one completed historical VAT Period for each. You add the documents in bulk, try the Company inbox and a connected client inbox, and use Resolve to collect corrected evidence. Then you compare what VATTY found against the work your practice already did on that period.

Nothing about how you currently file. VATTY runs alongside your existing process on a period you’ve already submitted, so you can see what it would have surfaced without altering anything live.