Most monthly VAT reconciliations fail not because the arithmetic is wrong but because the three source systems — your ledger, EFRIS, and your supporting evidence — are only glued together at month-end.
The playbook below runs the reconciliation continuously through the month, so by the 15th there's nothing left to reconcile.
Step 1 — Daily EFRIS pull
Pull EFRIS envelopes daily. VitalReturns does this automatically. The point is that any mismatch between an issued invoice and an EFRIS envelope is caught the day it happens, not the month it's filed.
Step 2 — Weekly ledger review
A fast weekly review of your sales ledger against EFRIS catches the second-order issues — missing supplier TINs, duplicated invoice numbers, voided transactions that didn't flow through.
Step 3 — Pre-filing checksum
The last line of defence: generate the VAT return a week early and compare the total against your ledger. Any gap is a bug — not a tolerance.