UK: 
USA:
13:00 (UTC+1), THURSDAY, 25 MAY 2023
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Innovate Tax today launched LimeLyte® Entity Manager; a new tool designed to transform VAT number validation and master data cleansing for tax teams.
LimeLyte® Entity Manager delivers unprecedented speed, accuracy and reliability by automating the validation of VAT numbers and, unlike other products on the market, creates an audit trail of all master tax data changes, providing users with an assurance of quality and compliance.
The technology connects directly with the world’s major tax authority portals, including those in the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Australia and the VIES platform for the European Union. This ensures VAT numbers and other critical data can be accessed and validated in huge volume in a matter of seconds.
As a result, under-pressure tax teams can save time and drive down costs, freeing up professionals to work on other projects while assured of accuracy in their VAT number data.
Andrew Bohnet, founder and head of product development at Innovate Tax, said:
“We’re so excited to bring a pioneering product to the market and to our portfolio of automated tax solutions. We have spent the last 10 years helping our clients understand the importance of data in the tax compliance process and this is the first of our tools that helps them find, resolve and most importantly prevent issues from happening.
“Whilst the development of a VAT number validation solution itself is nothing new – on the contrary, there are several tools that have been on the market for many years – LimeLyte® Entity Manager goes beyond being a quick, superficial number checker by being useful in the ways that matter most to tax professionals.”
As well as validating the status of a VAT number, LimeLyte® Entity Manager scrutinises and cleanses master data at every stage from entry to eventual use. After reformatting any VAT number, it performs multiple data validation checks before it even attempts to contact the appropriate tax authority. Its simple traffic light system ensures any red flags are highly visible to users, such as the name that the tax authority has registered for the VAT number matches that of your customer, allowing for rapid correction.
Once a VAT number has been approved, the tax authority confirmation code is saved and can be used as evidence of validation; negating the requirement to manually save details of validation requests or take screenshots, as recommended by HMRCHis Majesty's Revenue and Customs is a non-ministerial department of the UK Government responsible for the collection of taxes..
While there are already products on the market that can validate VAT numbers at the time of the APIApplication Programming Interface. APIs are an accessible way to extract and share data within and across organisations. call, LimeLyte® Entity Manager is the first solution developed to automatically re-check numbers every two months to ensure they remain valid. Users are alerted if any discrepancies are identified.
Additionally, if a user’s accounting system changes any of the data it is holding, LimeLyte® Entity Manager retains a record of each alteration to ensure full traceability; providing a crucial defence during any future VAT audit.
LimeLyte® Entity Manager has been tested and developed in BETA by several of Innovate Tax’s global clients, helping them not only to validate VAT numbers faster and more accurately than ever before, but also to prepare and perfect master data ahead of a wave of new digital regulations. These include the introduction of mandatory e-invoicingElectronic invoicing - widely referred to as e-invoicing - is the exchange of a digital document between a supplier and a buyer. E-invoices are issued, transmitted and received in a structured data format that enabled automatic and electronic processing. They contain data in a machine-readable format so that an AP system can read an invoice without manual data entry, leading to faster and more efficient invoicing. in many countries and the European Union’s VAT in the Digital Age (ViDAViDA or 'VAT in the Digital Age', is an EU initiative proposed by the European Commission that seeks to modernise and harmonise VAT processes for member states, by embracing new technologies. It is aimed at updating processes for the management of VAT, and reduce the VAT gap and fraud. The proposal also aims to address challenges in the area of VAT raised by the development of the platform economy.) reforms.
It’s no coincidence that its arrival comes at such a pivotal point in the digitalisation of tax.
Andrew explained:
“LimeLyte® Entity Manager is different. Its functionality and coverage is unrivalled. It offers tax professionals the chance to remove time-consuming, error-strewn manual processes from their workloads and replace them with cost-effective, fast and robust automation.
“We believe the arrival of LimeLyte® Entity Manager is a cornerstone for the tax technology market and will revolutionise the way data is managed by tax teams across the world – at exactly the time in history that the requirements for finance professionals to scrutinise and submit data are growing exponentially.”
LimeLyte® Entity Manager is the first entry in Innovate Tax’s original and unrivalled Data Validation Services suite to be brought to market, with the full suite launching in summer 2023.
