International VAT: the refund hiding in your expense data

International VAT: the refund hiding in your expense data

If your team travels, hosts events, or pays suppliers abroad, you're paying value-added tax (VAT) on a lot of it. VAT is a consumption tax applied to most goods and services across the EU, UK, and many other countries, often between 5% and 27% of the purchase. And a large share of what businesses pay on eligible expenses can be reclaimed.

But most companies never do.

It's more common than you think

Picture a typical quarter. Your team sends ten people to a conference in London: flights, hotels, restaurants, ground transport, and the event itself. Call it $60,000. At the UK's 20% VAT rate, roughly $10,000 of that spend is VAT, and a good portion of it is reclaimable.

Now multiply that by every conference, client trip, and overseas supplier invoice across a year, in each country you operate in. This is just the cost of doing business internationally, and the VAT inside it almost always goes unclaimed.

So why does it go unclaimed?

Because getting that money back means clearing three separate hurdles:

• Capture: First you have to identify the VAT on every eligible transaction and pull the right details from each receipt and invoice. Miss the data and the claim never exists.
• Compliance: Every country has its own rules, rates, deadlines, and invoice standards. You have to know what's reclaimable where, and confirm each invoice actually qualifies.
• Reclaim: Then you file, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and manage the back-and-forth with each tax authority until the refund lands.

Done by hand, across multiple countries, the effort usually outweighs the reward. So the VAT quietly becomes a write-off.

The potential

Reclaimed VAT is cash returned to the business: working capital you've already spent, coming back. For companies with real cross-border spend, that can put a serious sum on the books, year after year.

Now it's automatic for Ramp customers

We've partnered with VAT IT to handle all three steps for you. Once you connect, your Ramp expense data (transactions, receipts, and invoices) flows to VAT IT automatically. Their specialists identify the eligible VAT, manage the country-by-country compliance, and file the reclaims.

For your team, almost nothing changes. You keep working in Ramp exactly as you do today. No exports, no spreadsheets, no new process to learn. The data moves on its own, and the captured VAT stays consistent with what's recorded in your books.

Setup takes minutes. You connect once, and the VAT you've been leaving behind starts coming back.

International VAT has always been recoverable. Now it's finally easy.

Learn more about the integration here