We make cross-border selling
profoundly boring.
VATFlow is the storefront, the back-office, and the tax engine in one platform for UK and EU D2C fashion brands. We own the order lifecycle from cart to delivery so the VAT stays correct, the invoices stay compliant, and the returns file themselves on time — no drama, no surprises at the door.
Compliance should be the quietest part of selling.
A fashion brand should think about its collection, not about which country's VAT rules apply to an order shipped to Lyon on a Tuesday. Our job is to absorb that complexity so completely that the brand never has to look at it.
When a brand sells across the UK and the EU, the rules change the moment an order crosses a border. Place of supply moves. A scheme has to be chosen — UK domestic, EU OSS, import IOSS, or B2B reverse charge. A rate gets applied. A compliant invoice has to exist. And at the end of the quarter a single OSS return and a monthly UK MTD return have to be filed, digitally, to the right authority.
Most teams get most of this right most of the time. The gap between most and always is where the penalties live. We close that gap by treating it as a settled, tested, audited problem instead of a quarterly scramble.
Stitching tools together breaks the VAT.
The usual stack is a storefront wired to an ops tool wired to a tax add-on. Each tool sees a different slice of the order, and the VAT decision falls through the seams between them.
Storefront
A separate hosted shop that knows the cart but not the tax treatment.
Ops tool
An order manager that fulfils and tracks but re-derives totals on its own.
Tax add-on
A bolt-on that sees a finished order too late to set place of supply.
VAT is decided at the moment of supply — not after the fact. When three systems each own a fragment of the order, the place of supply, the scheme, and the rate get reconciled too late to be right. So we don't integrate with Shopify or WooCommerce, and we aren't a tax add-on. We are the storefront, the back-office, and the tax engine — one source of truth, one audit trail, from cart to delivery.
See how the platform fits togetherStorefront
Brands migrate to us. We host the store and checkout, products with full size/colour variants, and multi-warehouse inventory.
Back-office
The whole order lifecycle — fulfilment handed to your carrier, returns, credit notes, customers, and tracking on our own page.
Tax engine
Every order classified, compliant invoices generated, and your OSS quarterly + UK MTD returns filed from the same source of truth.
Four principles we don't bend.
These aren't slogans — they're constraints baked into the architecture. They're why a brand can hand us the boring, legally-risky part and stop watching it.
Accuracy first
The VAT engine is pure, isolated, and the most-tested code we own. Money is Decimal128 end to end — never a float. We build the legally-risky core before anything else, and we test it before we test the rest.
Tax rules are data
Country rates, thresholds, and scheme logic live in a seeded VATRate collection, not in branches buried in code. Adding a country is adding rows — not shipping a release. The rules can change as fast as the law does.
Audit everything
Every state change writes an immutable AuditLog entry: who, what, before, after, when. A periodic reconciliation job checks the books against themselves. When a tax authority asks how a number was reached, we can show our working.
No PII in logs
A redaction layer strips personal data before anything reaches a log line. Tenant data is scoped by tenantId on every query — multi-tenant leakage is treated as a P0. Calm software is software you can trust with the boring parts.
A small team that has felt this pain.
We've run fashion operations, built indirect-tax systems, and lived through a Brexit migration. VATFlow is the tool we wished existed.
Maren Aldous
Founder & CEOTen years building D2C ops; ran fulfilment for two fashion labels through Brexit.
Tobias Renn
Head of Tax EngineeringFormer indirect-tax engineer. Owns the classifier and the relationship with our tax advisers.
Priya Sondhi
Principal EngineerBuilt the audit log, reconciliation jobs, and the tenant-scoping that keeps brands separate.
The VAT engine is reviewed by qualified indirect-tax advisers before any rule ships.
Hand us the boring part.
Spin up a storefront, import your catalogue, and watch the first cross-border order classify itself. Free for 30 days — no card, no carrier credentials required.