Capture is everywhere now
Over the last couple of years, "photograph or forward an invoice and get a draft bill" has gone from a paid add-on to a bundled feature of mainstream accounting software. That's good news for buyers. It also moves the real question along: with the reading handled, who is checking what was read?
What capture answers, and what it doesn't ask
Capture answers one question: "what does this document say?" It reads a supplier name, a date, some totals, and drafts a transaction. What it typically doesn't ask is the question your VAT return actually depends on: "should this document be trusted as evidence?"
That second question breaks into pieces that are checkable, one by one:
- Is the supplier's VAT number real? A perfectly formatted number can belong to nobody, or to a different business than the invoice claims. Only the official registers can answer that: VIES for EU numbers, HMRC's Check-a-UK-VAT-number service for GB. (NoticeDesk runs the lookup against the relevant register; a lookup that can't be completed is recorded as unverified.)
- Are the required particulars present? HMRC's VAT guide lists what a full VAT invoice must show, and real supplier paperwork misses them constantly: a VAT number on the remittance slip but not the invoice, line items with totals but no quantity. Each gap weakens the document as evidence for the input-tax claim.
- Does the arithmetic hold? Net plus VAT should equal the total; the lines should sum to the subtotal. Capture reads the numbers; it rarely adds them up.
- Have you seen this invoice before? The same document arriving twice (email and post, supplier chaser and original) is how duplicate payments happen.
- Can you show your working later? If a return is ever queried, "the software imported it" is not an audit trail. What was checked, when, against what, and who changed what afterwards: that's the evidence a working paper wants.
Why the checking belongs at capture, not after
Most checking happens late: at quarter end, during return prep, or after a query letter. By then the defective invoice is already in the ledger, reconciled, maybe paid. Fixing it means finding it first. The cheapest moment to catch a missing particular, a failed lookup or a sum that doesn't add is the moment the document enters your system, while the supplier email is still open and a corrected invoice is one reply away.
Different jobs, both worth doing
Keep whatever reads your documents into your ledger; reading and checking are different jobs, and NoticeDesk does both. Every document gets its fields read one by one, with the doubtful ones flagged, then put through 16 compliance checks (a 17th on credit notes and on receipts) with the gov.uk reference attached wherever an HMRC rule applies. The supplier's registration is checked against the official register where it can be, and the whole verdict is stored, so the period you file is a period you can evidence, invoice by invoice.
If the checking in your workflow today is a spreadsheet at quarter end, this is the gap NoticeDesk closes. Plans start at £19/month ex VAT, and the pricing page shows which plans start with a free trial.