User Guide

Drop any Belgian company onto the screen in one search. Paste the 10-digit KBO/BCE enterprise number with or without dots; type a fragment of the legal name; type a trade name or brand; type an executive's surname; or type a sector keyword like 'logistics' or 'cleanroom'. Results stream in as you type, with typo tolerance and a semantic layer that understands categories, so you find the right company even when you don't know its exact registered name. Each hit shows the name, enterprise number, primary activity and last filed revenue, which is usually enough to pick the right entity at a glance. Click through to open the full profile. If two companies share a name, the enterprise number is the only safe way to disambiguate — see the explainer on the Belgian enterprise number for why.

Use the screener when you need to find every Belgian company that fits a specific commercial profile rather than one company you already know. Combine any of the available filters — revenue, EBIT, EBITDA, headcount in full-time equivalents, gross and operating margins, financial leverage, year-on-year growth, NACE sector codes, province, postal-code range — and the result list updates as you tune the controls. Multiple NACE codes can be added at once, so you can screen a single sector or a coherent cluster of related sectors in one go. Once you've dialled in a screen that produces a useful shortlist, save it as a preset and re-run it later when fresh annual accounts arrive. From the shortlist you can sort on any column, export to CSV for further work, or send the selected rows straight into the comparison tool. This is the path most M&A advisors and sourcing analysts take when they need to qualify a longlist in fifteen minutes.

Open any company profile and you land on a Summary tab that tries to answer 'what does this company actually do, and is it healthy?' in a single screen: the AI-written narrative, the headline financial trajectory and the recent corporate events. The other nine tabs are organised around specific tasks. P&L and Balance Sheet for verifying the numbers. Credit Analysis for assessing leverage, coverage and liquidity before extending terms. Administrators for checking who currently runs the business and who used to. Structure for mapping the parent, subsidiaries and branches. Sector Benchmark for placing the company against its NACE peers on revenue, margin and growth percentiles. Similar Companies for finding peers and acquisition references. Publications for following the corporate timeline through the Belgian Official Gazette. Network Graph for visualising shared directorships across the broader Belgian corporate landscape. Financial data is sourced exclusively from the NBB annual accounts; registry data from the KBO/BCE; publications from the Staatsblad.

On any company profile, click the AI insights button to get a plain-language narrative that answers the questions you'd ask a colleague: what does this company do, who are its customers, what segments and products does it operate in, how have its financials evolved, who runs it. The AI reads the company's own NBB filings, pulls in its public website if it has one, scans recent press signals, and writes a summary grounded in that material. It only writes what it can prove. If a fact isn't in the filings, the website, or a public news source, it doesn't make it into the summary — no hallucinations, no guesswork. The first time you open a profile you may see a fast skeleton summary; the richer narrative quietly replaces it within thirty to sixty seconds. Treat the AI summary as a starting point that gets you up to speed in time for the meeting, not as a substitute for reading the underlying filings before any decision of consequence.

Open the Similar Companies tab whenever you need a longlist of Belgian companies that look like the one you're looking at — for a buy-side search, an acquisition reference, a peer-group section in an investment memo, or a sector study. The default ranking combines the same primary NACE sector with comparable revenue and a vector-based similarity score derived from what each company actually does. Click AI Rank to re-rank the list with a stronger semantic comparison; the AI Rank version adds a one-sentence rationale per match, which is useful when a sector contains both your target's real peers and a long tail of companies that happen to share a code without doing the same thing. Send the resulting list to the comparison tool, export to CSV, or save the most relevant ones to favourites for ongoing tracking.

Open the Publications tab when you need to know what has happened, legally, to a Belgian company. Every Belgian Official Gazette filing linked to the entity is here: appointments and dismissals of directors, capital increases and decreases, statutory amendments, changes of registered office, mergers, demergers, dissolutions, and the opening and closing of bankruptcy proceedings. Each entry links back to the original PDF in the Staatsblad, so you can quote the source. The Summarise button produces an AI-generated chronological overview that highlights the substantive events — ownership transfers, control changes, capital restructurings — so you don't have to read fifteen years of legal notices line by line to understand what really happened. This is the path most journalists and credit analysts take when they need to follow the paper trail behind a story or a counterparty.

Use the sector statistics view to sanity-check a company against the typical numbers for its sector before quoting a multiple, supporting a credit decision, or writing the peer-group section of a memo. Pick a NACE code or a coherent cluster of NACE codes and you'll see the number of active filers in that sector, median and quartile revenue, median EBITDA margin, headcount distribution, and a histogram of revenue and growth across the population. The page is most useful as a reality check: if the median company in a sector earns five million in revenue, a target with one hundred million in revenue is not actually competing in the same arena, and the multiple you'd quote should reflect that. Combine with the screener to identify outliers above or below sector medians.

Use people search when you need to verify the corporate footprint of a single individual rather than a single company. Every natural person who appears in a Belgian company's KBO record or in a Staatsblad publication is here — current and historical directors, board members, statutory auditors, liquidators and parties named in legal notices. Each person profile aggregates every mandate they hold or have held, which is the fastest way to confirm an executive's claimed track record, map a director's full corporate footprint, or identify shared management teams across a portfolio. The KBO open-data licence allows this for research; it does not allow using the data to compile direct-marketing lists, and Datasnoop's exports are scoped accordingly.

Click the heart icon on any profile or any search result to save the company to your personal favourites list. Favourites sync across devices via your account, so a shortlist you built on a laptop is immediately available on a phone in the meeting. The favourites view is the natural starting point for ongoing tracking and weekly review: re-open it on Monday morning to see whose annual accounts have been deposited since last week, whose registry information has changed, and whose Staatsblad publications deserve a second look. For larger watchlists, combine favourites with saved screener presets so you keep both the named companies and the rules that surfaced new ones.

Use the comparison tool when you need to put multiple Belgian companies on the same page across every available metric — revenue, EBITDA, EBIT, margin, growth, leverage, coverage, headcount, total assets, equity, net debt. Send companies into the comparison tool from a screener result, from a similar-companies list, or from your favourites. The view is built for three concrete tasks: validating a benchmark before quoting a sector multiple, supporting the peer-group section of an investment memo, and simply checking whether two companies are genuinely comparable before you treat them as such. Export the comparison to Excel when you need to take it into your own template.

Export from wherever you are: a screener result to CSV with every visible column, a single company profile to Excel or PDF including the AI narrative, the financial tables and the publications timeline, or a comparison view to Excel for further work in your own template. Exports keep the source data attribution so you can cite filings cleanly in a memo. They are intended for analysis and decision-making. Bulk exports for cold-call lists or marketing campaigns are not allowed under the KBO open-data licence and are not supported by design — if your task is research, you'll have everything you need; if your task is a marketing list, this is the wrong tool.