Why we built InvoiceGuard
Most billing problems are not technical failures.
They are timing failures.
The data was wrong, but nobody noticed until it was too late.
An invoice was already issued.
Accounting flagged it days later.
Support had to get involved.
Someone had to reissue documents, explain mistakes, and fix trust.
If you have ever dealt with cross border billing, VAT, or even just bad billing emails, you have probably seen this.
The frustrating part is that most of these issues were detectable earlier.
The gap we kept seeing
Teams usually validate billing data in one of three ways.
Some do nothing and fix problems later.
Some do manual checks for certain countries or customers.
Some have a mix of scripts and checks that grew over time.
What almost nobody had was a single, predictable check right before invoices are created.
Something that says, calmly and clearly:
- “This looks fine.”
- “This looks risky.”
- “This should probably be fixed before you continue.”
With reasons.
Why existing tools did not fit
Payment providers validate data at payment time.
Accounting tools validate after the fact.
Compliance tools often try to do everything and end up being heavy.
We did not want another dashboard, another scoring system, or another compliance claim.
We wanted a guardrail.
Something small enough to trust, and boring enough to leave running.
What InvoiceGuard actually does
InvoiceGuard is one API call you make before an invoice or billing profile is created.
It checks high signal things that frequently cause problems later, like:
- VAT number validity and country mismatch
- Billing email risk and obvious issues
- Country consistency across billing fields
- Company domain sanity
It returns a simple decision and the reasons behind it.
It does not hide uncertainty.
If something cannot be verified, it says so.
What we were careful about
We designed InvoiceGuard with a few strict rules.
It never blocks invoices by default.
If an external provider fails, it degrades safely.
It never claims compliance or legal correctness.
It explains what it saw instead of pretending certainty.
If InvoiceGuard is wrong, you should be able to see why.
What this is not
InvoiceGuard is not an accounting system.
It is not a payment processor.
It does not validate bank accounts, enrich companies, or score customers.
It does not try to replace your judgment.
It is there to reduce avoidable mistakes earlier in the process.
Why we are starting small
We are intentionally starting with a small number of teams.
Not to test scale, but to test usefulness.
If InvoiceGuard does not catch anything meaningful in your flow, you should turn it off. That is a valid outcome.
If it catches even one issue you would have otherwise fixed later, it has probably paid for itself.
How we think about trust
Trust is not built by promises or feature lists.
It is built when a tool behaves predictably, fails safely, and does not get in the way.
That is what we are trying to do here.
If you have billing flows, issue invoices, and have ever thought “we should have caught that earlier”, then InvoiceGuard might be useful.
If not, that is completely fine too.
We built it because we kept running into this problem ourselves, and we wanted something boring that worked.