User onboarding journey
The general path you follow when you set up your account and use the External Partner API to submit your VAT filing data and retrieve your results.
Some steps in this journey happen through the External Partner API. Other steps happen in VAT Filing.
Onboarding steps overview
- Set up your account
- Before you can use VAT filing, Sovos creates a client account for you using your workspace credentials, a key and a secret. This account gets product IDs and an admin email. You do this step through the API.
- Create your company profile
After Sovos sets up your account, you create a company under that account. You specify the company's country, for example Hungary, its tax registration number, and other company details. You complete this step through the API.
- Get an access token
- You use your account's API key and secret to generate an access token. You need this token to authenticate every API call that follows.
- Listing available filings
- You call the External Partner API to list the filings available for your company. In a non-production environment, this call might return sample data. In production, the response reflects your company's real filings based on its country and configuration.
- Upload your transaction files
For a specific filing, you request a time-limited URL. You upload your transaction file, in .xlsx or JSON format, to that URL, and Sovos processes it. If the file has problems, Sovos returns errors so you can fix and re-upload it. If the file is valid, Sovos marks it as complete.
- Get your result files
After Sovos processes your file, you can retrieve result files through the API, such as error reports, draft PDFs, and XML files. Each new upload replaces the previous result files for that filing, so only the latest version is available.
- Make manual adjustments and finish the filing
If you need to adjust the filing by hand, open the VAT Filing web application using Single Sign On (SSO) through SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) and the filing ID. There, you can make adjustments, generate draft or final PDFs, and finalize the report. The API always reflects the latest status and files, even after changes made in the web application.
- Filter your results
You can filter filings and companies by country, date, and report type using query parameters in the API.
- Check status updates
You can check status updates, such as file processing or report completion, by polling the API.
