Built by someone in the middle of it

The short version

I'm building a house in Lancashire. Blocks and sand from one merchant, drainage from another, concrete from a third, and a stack of one-off suppliers in between. Every order meant messages, calls and emails, and every delivery produced a piece of paper I'd need at the end to claim the VAT back.

Partway through, I started checking those invoices properly. Some were missing the supplier's VAT number. One was addressed to just my first name. One charged 20% on groundworks that may not have been chargeable at all — that one invoice alone had £305 of VAT sitting in the wrong place.

All of it was fixable, because the invoices were recent. Two years later, when most people open the box, none of it would have been.

So I built the thing I wanted: something that checks each invoice as it lands, tells you what's wrong while the merchant will still reissue it, and has the claim already built by the time the build finishes.

How it's made

Every rule is checked against published GOV.UK guidance, carries its source and the date it was verified, and is versioned — so a claim prepared today can be reproduced exactly, even after HMRC changes something. Cases that aren't clear-cut go to a VAT specialist, and the answer becomes a rule so nobody meets that question cold again.

TO ADD Specialist's name or firm, once engaged. Being able to say who reviews the rules is worth more than saying they're reviewed.

What Footings isn't

It isn't a tax adviser, it doesn't give tax advice, and it doesn't submit anything to HMRC on your behalf. It checks documents against published guidance, tells you what it finds, and gives you a pack you submit yourself. Where something needs a professional judgement, we say so rather than guessing.