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 sheet 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 sheet, 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 on your monitor, 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 Google Sheet. 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:
Validate each EU VAT number in column B using TaxJar and write the validation status to column C and the associated company name to column D
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.
- Numbers that return a VIES lookup error (temporary unavailability, country-specific issues) get a note in column C rather than silently marking as invalid.
- All 150 validations run in one pass — you're not clicking through a web form.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
VAT numbers have inconsistent formatting — some have country prefixes, some don't
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 and company name to column D
You also need the registered address written back
The legal team wants the registered address for any valid VAT number so they can cross-check it against what's on file.
Validate each VAT number in column B using TaxJar — write valid or invalid to column C, registered 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 and company name to column D. For all other rows write "SKIP" in column C.
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 — then compare column D to column A and if the names don't match, write "NAME MISMATCH" in column E so the invoicing team can investigate before sending
One prompt covers the cleanup, the validation, and the cross-check that would otherwise be three separate manual passes.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet 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.