Is your store charging every kind of buyer the right VAT — and can you prove it?

§ 1 · How a scan works

Real calculations, not a settings checklist.

1. The scan prices real scenarios

   Each scenario is priced by Shopify’s own tax engine via draft-order calculations — nothing is ever ordered, paid for, or changed. Guest buyers, business buyers with and without reverse-charge exemptions, and Shopify B2B company accounts are all covered.

2. Results become findings that say what kind of claim they make

   Observed configuration · reproducible calculation discrepancy · suspected compliance issue · accountant review required. A calculation discrepancy is never reported from a single reading — it must still be there on a re-check an hour or more later.

3. You get the report your accountant actually wants

   Dated, versioned, with the full evidence table attached — exportable as CSV and printable to PDF.

§ 2 · What we will and will not claim

The evidence earns every sentence on this page.

The engine’s readings were verified against real checkout runs — amounts and tax lines — for guest checkout, B2B company checkout, tax-inclusive pricing and reduced-rate goods, on Shopify Tax and on manual-rates stores. The most recent of those readings is a completed order: a printed book sold from Ireland to Berlin, charged Germany’s reduced rate of 7%, exactly as the engine expected.

Never touched

No theme edits, no checkout changes, no price changes. VATparity leaves your store the way it found it.

Never hidden

The app’s own test data — four clearly-named records, the two products kept as hidden drafts that no shopper can see or buy — is documented on the Setup screen and removable there with one click. Our database is purged at uninstall; the in-store records go too where the access token still allows it, which is why the Setup button exists.

Never rushed

One surprising reading is an observation, not a finding. It becomes a finding only when a re-check an hour or more later still shows it.

Never advice

These are software test results, not tax advice — the report says so on every page, and so does the footer of this one.

§ 3 · Monitoring

Shopify’s tax engine changes under stores.

The paid plan re-scans weekly and alerts you when a result changes — so the day a calculation shifts under your store, you find out from a re-scan instead of a filing.

§ 4 · Pricing

One plan, no tiers.

Everything VATparity can do is in one flat plan.

§ 5 · Common problems

The problems merchants actually search for — measured.

Each page is one failure mode: the real checkout measurements that pin it down, and the ten-minute manual check that needs no app at all.

• B2B customer charged VAT despite a valid VAT number The VAT number and the exemption are separate facts — and only one of them prices the order.
• Reverse charge not applied at checkout The two paths that zero-rate a business buyer, and the two measured ways they silently fail.
• VAT-inclusive pricing and cross-border buyers The total holds still, the tax inside it moves — and zero-rated buyers can pay the taxed gross.
• Manual Tax ignores VAT exemptions The exemption is on file and inert — measured all the way to a completed order.