How to read a Belgian annual account

Companies above certain thresholds are required to deposit their annual accounts with the Central Balance Sheet Office of the National Bank of Belgium. Which template they file depends on their size, and the template determines how much detail you get. Reading a Belgian annual account properly means knowing which rubrics exist in your template, which exist only in larger ones, and which can be derived rather than read directly.

The three filing templates

• Micro-format (modèle micro / micromodel)— available to very small companies under tight thresholds (max balance sheet around €700k, max revenue around €1.4m, max headcount 10 FTE on average). Discloses only headline balance-sheet and income-statement totals; no breakdown of revenue, cost of sales, or operating expenses.
• Abbreviated format (modèle abrégé / verkort schema)— for small companies that exceed the micro thresholds but stay below the full-format thresholds. Discloses an aggregated income statement (operating income vs. operating costs, with limited break-down) and a more detailed balance sheet.
• Full format (modèle complet / volledig schema)— mandatory for companies above the size thresholds and for all companies that have securities on a regulated market. Discloses revenue separately from other operating income, breaks down cost of sales, payroll, depreciation, and all balance-sheet line items in detail.

The rubric codes

Belgian GAAP uses numeric rubric codes to identify each line in the standardised template. The codes are stable across companies and across the three formats, although smaller templates only use a subset. A few that matter for almost every analysis:

• 70— revenue (turnover from sales of goods and services). Disclosed in full and abbreviated; aggregated into 70/74 in the abbreviated format and absent from micro filings.
• 9900— result of operations before non-operating items.
• 9901— operating profit (also referred to as result of operations, equivalent to EBIT in international comparison).
• 630— depreciation, amortisation, and write-downs. Adding this back to 9901 gives EBITDA. See EBITDA in Belgian GAAP for a worked example.
• 10/15— total equity.
• 10— capital subscribed.
• 20/58— total assets.
• 9087— average headcount in full-time equivalents.

Comparing filers across templates

The biggest practical issue when screening Belgian companies is that a micro-format filer simply does not disclose its revenue. You can see that a company exists, you can see its total balance sheet, you can see its operating profit, but you cannot see the top line. This is by design — the regulator deliberately reduced the disclosure burden for the smallest companies. When benchmarking, this means you have to choose between (a) restricting your screen to abbreviated and full filers (which excludes the long tail of small companies) or (b) treating revenue as missing for micro filers and benchmarking on metrics that are universally disclosed (operating profit, total assets, equity, headcount).

The April-2022 break

Since April 2022, the National Bank requires accounts to be deposited in XBRL, an XML-based machine-readable format. Anything filed before that date is available only as a PDF (or, for very old filings, as a scan) and must be re-keyed if you want structured data. In practice this means a company's most recent filings are perfectly comparable across the database, but historical comparisons before 2022 depend on whether the line you care about was extracted into the PDF tables. Datasnoop normalises both, but flags which figures come from XBRL and which are derived from PDF extraction.

What the accounts do not tell you

Belgian statutory accounts are filed at the legal-entity level, which means a holding structure with a Belgian topco, several Belgian opcos, and foreign subsidiaries will present a different picture depending on which entity you look at. The consolidated accounts are filed only by groups above the consolidation threshold, and even then the group perimeter follows Belgian law rather than IFRS. For an operational view of a group, the consolidated filing of the topco is the right starting point. For a credit view of a specific guarantor, the standalone filing of that entity is what matters.