The Scenario
It's the third week of December and you're the finance manager overseeing year-end invoicing for a SaaS company with 150 European customers. Every invoice that goes to an EU business needs the customer's VAT number validated before it goes out — a bad number means the invoice is wrong, and correcting an invoice after it's been sent is a conversation nobody wants to have.
Your Excel workbook has customer names in column A, VAT numbers in column B, and columns C and D are empty. The target: valid or invalid status in column C, registered company name in column D.
The bad version:
- Open the VIES website, paste in a VAT number, read the result, switch back to the workbook, type in the status. Repeat for 150 rows over about an hour.
- Find that about 20 numbers return "INVALID" but you're not sure if it's the number itself or a temporary VIES downtime — you have to re-check them later.
- Send the invoice run anyway, flag the uncertain ones in a sticky note, and make a mental note to circle back by Thursday.
Year-end invoicing is the wrong moment to be running manual VAT lookups. The numbers need to be verified, the names need to match, and there are 130 other things on the close checklist.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your VAT number column and through its built-in TaxJar integration it validates each number against the VIES database and writes the results back — status and registered company name — without you touching a separate tool.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Check all 150 VAT numbers in column B of my Excel sheet against the VIES database via TaxJar — write 'valid' or 'invalid' to column C, company name to column D, and registered address to column E
What You Get
- Column C shows "valid" or "invalid" for every VAT number.
- Column D shows the registered company name returned by VIES for valid numbers.
- Column E shows the registered address for valid numbers.
- Numbers that return a VIES lookup error get a note in column C rather than silently marking as invalid.
- All 150 validations run in one pass.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
VAT numbers have inconsistent formatting
Your CRM exports numbers in different styles: "DE123456789," "123456789," "DE 123 456 789."
Normalize every value in column B to include the 2-letter country prefix and no spaces, then validate each against TaxJar's VAT validation and write status to column C, company name to column D, and registered address to column E
Only validate numbers for a subset of countries
Your European entity only invoices customers in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Other country prefixes don't need validation this cycle.
For rows in column B where the VAT number starts with DE, FR, NL, or BE, validate using TaxJar and write status to column C, company name to column D, and address to column E. For all other rows write "SKIP" in column C.
You also need to flag where the registered name doesn't match your records
The legal team wants to know if any VAT-registered company name differs significantly from what's in column A.
Validate each VAT number in column B via TaxJar, write status to column C and registered company name to column D, then compare column D to column A — write "NAME MISMATCH" in column E if the names differ meaningfully
The kill chain: normalize, validate, flag mismatches, and mark for review
Normalize all VAT numbers in column B to prefix-and-no-spaces format, validate each via TaxJar, write status to column C and company name to column D, registered address to column E — then compare column D to column A and write "NAME MISMATCH" in column F for any discrepancy, and "REVIEW" in column F for any row that returned a lookup error
One prompt covers the cleanup, the validation, and the cross-check together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with EU customer VAT numbers — ask it to validate every row and write status and company name back. You can also explore registering tax-exempt customers or pulling TaxJar transactions for reconciliation.