Overview
For an invoice to qualify for VAT recovery, it usually has to be issued to your company. In several countries - Italy and Spain among them - the company name must be printed on the invoice even for very small purchases, so VAT4U's Comply module verifies that your company name actually appears on the document.
Real invoices rarely spell your legal name the way your registration does. VAT4U gives you two settings to control how strict that verification is:
Alternative names - extra spellings of your company name that are accepted as if they were the legal name.
Require exact match - a switch that turns off tolerant matching when your group has several legal entities with near-identical names.
Both live in Company settings → General → Company name verification.
How the check works by default
By default the check is tolerant: it passes when 60% of the words of your legal name are found anywhere in the document.
Example - legal name Globex Corporation Ltd passes on invoices reading:
Globex Corporation Ltd
Globex Corporation Limited
Globex Corporation
This is what most customers want. Suffixes get dropped, legal forms get written out, a word goes missing in OCR - the invoice still passes.
If your legal name consists of only two words, the tolerant check looks for the first word only, since 60% of two words cannot be measured meaningfully.
Alternative names
Alternative names are additional full spellings of your company name. During a compliance check, VAT4U looks for your legal name and every alternative name you registered; if any of them is found, the company name requirement is satisfied.
To add them: Company settings → General → Company name verification → Alternative names. Type a variation, press Enter, repeat, then save.
Typical uses: a trading name, a former name after a rebrand, a local-language spelling, or a transliteration ("Müller" written "Mueller") that the tolerant matcher would otherwise miss.
Require exact match
Tolerant matching has a downside: it cannot tell apart legal entities whose names differ by only a few characters.
An invoice addressed to Amazon Services Europe S.à r.l. passes the check for Amazon EU S.à r.l., because both contain "amazon" and "sarl". For a group that files claims per entity, that is the wrong answer - a near miss is a different company.
Turn on Require exact match and the verification changes for your company only:
Your legal name, or one of your alternative names, must appear in full on the invoice.
What is still ignored
Only differences that carry no meaning:
Difference | Example (legal name Globex Corporation Ltd) | Result |
Upper / lower case | GLOBEX CORPORATION LTD | ✅ Match |
Punctuation | Globex Corporation Ltd. | ✅ Match |
Accents | Amazon EU S.a r.l. for Amazon EU S.à r.l. | ✅ Match |
Spacing / words joined | AMAZON EU SARL for Amazon EU S.à r.l. | ✅ Match |
Extra words before or after the full name | Globex Corporation Ltd & Co KG | ✅ Match |
What no longer passes
Difference | Example (legal name Globex Corporation Ltd) | Result |
Shortened or truncated name | Globex Corporation | ❌ No match |
Expanded or translated legal form | Globex Corporation Limited | ❌ No match |
Abbreviated word | Globex Corp. Ltd | ❌ No match |
Extra word inside the name | Globex Corporation Holdings Ltd | ❌ No match |
Name embedded in a longer word | Globex Corporation Ltda | ❌ No match |
When the name is not found, the invoice is flagged as non-compliant with the missing claimant name reason, exactly as before.
Alternative names under exact match
Alternative names keep working and remain your escape hatch - but they are matched with the same strictness. So when you enable exact matching, register every spelling you accept as an alternative name, for example:
Amazon EU S.à r.l. (legal name)
Amazon EU Sarl
Amazon EU S.a r.l.
Each of them then has to appear in full for the check to pass.
Where the setting applies
The setting applies to every route an invoice can take through the compliance check:
Scanned and PDF invoices verified against the extracted text.
XML e-invoices (UBL, FatturaPA, KSeF, CII), where the buyer name carried in the file is compared to your company name. With exact matching on, a truncated buyer name in the XML counts as a mismatch.
AI-assisted compliance checks, where the AI is instructed to match exactly and the result is re-verified against the document afterwards, so a near miss cannot slip through.
When to use it
Enable Require exact match if your group has sibling legal entities whose names differ by only a few characters, and you need each entity's invoices kept apart.
Leave it off - the default - in every other case. On a single-entity company it mostly produces false non-compliance flags, because ordinary invoices abbreviate and reword company names all the time.
Good to know
The setting is per company. Enabling it on one company in your account does not affect the others.
Changing it affects invoices checked from now on. Invoices that were already processed keep their current compliance result until they are re-checked.
Only company administrators can change it.