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Troubleshooting

"VIES says valid, but customer is still being charged 19% VAT"​

99% of the time this is the customer-group / tax-rule chain, not the module. Walk the chain on the Customer Group Mapping page and confirm every link.

Quick checklist:

  1. Is Auto-Assign Customer Group turned on?
  2. Does the configured "Intra-EU / UK Valid" group have a tax class assigned (not "None")?
  3. Is there a tax rule mapping that customer tax class + the product tax class + the customer's country to 0%?
  4. Has the customer logged out and back in after their group changed? (Cached groups in the session can mask new assignments.)

"Status: unavailable" on every call​

The upstream is timing out or returning 5xx.

tail -50 var/log/vat_validator.log

Common causes:

  • Outbound HTTPS blocked at firewall — VIES, HMRC, and UID-CHE all need port 443 outbound
  • Timeout too low (default 5 sec; bump to 8–10 if your network has high latency to the upstreams)
  • Upstream is genuinely down — VIES has scheduled maintenance windows, typically Mondays 03:00–06:00 CET

unavailable results are not persisted to the audit log and never strip a customer's existing customer group.

Module enabled but nothing happens at checkout​

Check that Validate on Checkout is Yes — it's a separate toggle from the master enable.

If still nothing:

tail -f var/log/vat_validator.log

…then trigger a checkout. If you see no log entries, check that the billing address has both country_id and vat_id set.

CSV export button is greyed out​

The export buttons are gated by the Byte8_VatValidator::log_export ACL resource. Edit the admin role under System → Permissions → User Roles and grant access.

Schema upgrade error after install​

If setup:upgrade fails on the byte8_vat_validator_log table, check:

  • Magento DB user has CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE privileges on the Magento database
  • No existing table named byte8_vat_validator_log from a previous install attempt — drop it manually if so

Hyvä indicator doesn't appear​

  • Confirm Byte8_VatValidatorHyva is enabled (bin/magento module:status)
  • Run bin/magento cache:flush after install — Hyvä caches layout aggressively
  • Open the page source and confirm Byte8_VatValidatorHyva::vat-indicator.phtml is rendered. If not, your theme may have removed the form.additional.info container — override the module's layout XML to point at your theme's equivalent container.

Still stuck​

Open an issue on GitHub with:

  • Magento version (bin/magento --version)
  • Output of bin/magento module:status | grep Byte8
  • Last 50 lines of var/log/vat_validator.log
  • The CLI test that's failing: bin/magento byte8:vat:validate <number>