PRH: Finland VAT register

The Finnish Patent and Registration Office publishes the Business Information System jointly with the Tax Administration, and its open data interface exposes the company records behind it, VAT registration included. A Finnish VAT number is the business ID with its hyphen removed, so one lookup covers both identifiers.

PRH is run by the Finnish Patent and Registration Office, and its data is published at avoindata.prh.fi. It is one of the 10 national registers Avatcado consults on the Pro and Business plans when VIES cannot answer for Finland, and it never replaces a VIES answer that does arrive. The national registry fallback guide covers the full precedence order.

What PRH publishes

• The company record behind a Finnish business ID, including its names with the dates each was entered and ended
• A list of registered entries, one per register the company is entered in, each with the authority that keeps it and an end date when the entry has lapsed
• Street addresses and postal addresses with post codes and post offices in several languages
• Open data licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so the register can be read and reused without an agreement

How Avatcado uses it

A Finnish fallback turns the VAT number back into a business ID by inserting the hyphen before the check digit, then asks the open data interface for that company. VAT registration is read as a registered entry in the VAT register kept by the Tax Administration with no end date on it. An entry that has ended, or a company with no such entry, means Avatcado has learned nothing it can act on, so the request falls through to the cache rather than being answered as invalid.

PRH answers per number, so Avatcado calls it while your request is open, with a 10 second timeout. There is no snapshot to go stale (queried live on the request), so a fallback answer reflects the register as it stood at that moment. If the register is slow or down as well, the request falls through to the cache.

The rule that matters most is that a register can only ever confirm a registration. A miss, whether PRH says not registered or simply has no record, is never turned into valid: false: the request falls through to the stored result instead. An answer that does come from here carries source: "prh" and source_status: "fallback", and no consultation_number field at all, because only VIES issues those.

What a PRH answer contains

Data quirks worth knowing

• Open data has no private traders, municipalities or wellbeing services counties, so a missing record is never served as invalid
• The current name is the entry that has not ended, which matters for a company that has traded under several names: an old name is present in the record but is not what a fallback answer returns
• Registration is expressed as an entry in a numbered register rather than as a VAT flag, so the answer depends on reading the right register and the right authority
• Addresses come in more than one form and language, and the postal form is the one a fallback answer formats into a single line

Try it

Validating a Finland VAT number takes the same call whichever source answers it. This one uses FI01120389, a real registered number:

curl "https://api.avatcado.com/v1/validate?vat_number=FI01120389" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer avat_live_your_api_key"

import Avatcado from "@avatcado/node";

const avatcado = new Avatcado("avat_live_your_api_key");
const { data, error } = await avatcado.vat.validate({
  vatNumber: "FI01120389",
});

if (data?.meta.source === "prh") {
  // VIES was unavailable; PRH confirmed the registration.
  console.log(data.meta.source_status); // "fallback"
}

On an ordinary day that answer comes from VIES, with source_status: "live". Only when VIES cannot answer for Finland does PRH step in, and then meta.source_status reads "fallback" and meta.source reads "prh". The register fallback is included in the Pro and Business plans; the free tier covers 500 validations per month from VIES and the cache. Get an API key or read the API documentation.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

• Finland VAT number format and validation
• Country coverage: what answers every country Avatcado validates
• All 10 national VAT registers
• VIES Down? How the National Registry Fallback Works
• VIES Downtime: Why It Happens and How to Handle It
• VIES API Guide: REST Endpoint, SOAP & Integration