Financica now produces the .xbrl file the National Bank's Central Balance Sheet Office accepts. The year-end checks, the corporate tax charge and the liquidation reserve entry were already there. The file is the last piece.
This post covers what each step writes to your ledger, with the accounts and a worked example.
Year-end checks
Reports > Year-end close runs a list of checks against your books. Blocking checks mean your statutory accounts would be wrong or the National Bank would refuse the filing. Review checks flag something for your decision and do not stop you generating the file.
Nothing is stored. The check clears next time you open the page once you have corrected the entry.
What gets checked:
- Uncategorized accounts still holding amounts
- Balance sheet accounts whose code matches no statutory rubric
- Off-balance accounts with a residual balance
- Invoices you issued or received, dated up to the year end, that are not posted
- Invoices still open at the closing date
- Accounts with a balance on the unexpected side
- Registered fixed assets with no depreciation booked for the year
- Currencies in the books with no closing rate
- The year's corporate tax charge
- Whether the fiscal year is locked
Most checks have no button, because the fix is a judgment call. Whether a supplier balance on the wrong side is a misapplied payment or a genuine advance is yours to decide.
Two checks do have a button, and both post to your ledger.
Corporate tax
Reports > Corporate tax calculates the tax on your result line by line from your own books. Run it in September on the year in progress and you can still act on what it says.
The starting figure is your accounting result with the income tax accounts left out, so booking the tax does not change the figure the tax is calculated on.
Financica reads disallowed expenses from your accounts. Fines at 100%, restaurant costs at 31%, reception and gifts at 50%, from the standard Belgian codes. The percentage is saved on the account. Book client lunches to an account you created yourself, set 31% on it once, and every year after that is right.
Car accounts are listed without a percentage. The deductible share depends on each car's CO₂ emissions and purchase date. Your books hold neither, so the line stays empty until you set it.
Carried-forward tax losses work the same way. The report proposes your accumulated accounting loss as a starting point. Your real tax loss history is your accountant's to confirm.
Small companies pay 20% on the first €100,000 and 25% above it. When the reduced rate does not apply, the report names the condition that failed. The one that usually bites is the director's remuneration: €45,000 a year for financial years up to 2025, €50,000 from 2026, or your taxable result if that is lower. The other statutory conditions still apply, including the shareholding test.
Two start-up reliefs are applied for you:
- The remuneration condition only starts from your fifth financial year. A company in its first four years gets the reduced rate with no director's pay at all.
- No prepayment surcharge is due for your first three financial years.
Both run from the date of incorporation, which is why the report asks for it. If the company took over an activity you were already carrying on as a sole trader, the clock runs from that business's first registration instead. You may have used the window up already.
The entry
Book shows you the exact entry and posts it once you confirm. Two legs, dated at your year end:
| Account | ||
|---|---|---|
| Debit | 6702 | Estimated income tax charge |
| Credit | 4500 | Estimated income tax payable |
That is the whole entry. Your prepayments stay on 412 where you booked them. They are read to calculate the surcharge and they are not netted off the payable, so you finish the year with both balances standing. Clearing them against the assessment when it arrives is a separate entry you post yourself.
The liquidation reserve
The reserve has to be constituted in the year the profit is made, so it belongs at the year end. It is open to small companies only, under article 184quater.
One transaction goes in, four legs, dated at your year end:
| Account | ||
|---|---|---|
| Debit | 6921 | Appropriations to other reserves |
| Credit | 133x | Liquidation reserve <year> (art. 184quater) |
| Debit | 67020 | Separate levy on liquidation reserve |
| Credit | 4500 | Estimated income tax payable |
The levy comes out of the same profit as the reserve, so the maximum reserve is your result after corporate tax and before appropriation, divided by 1.10. On a year with €40,000 before tax:
| Result before tax | €40,000.00 |
| Corporate tax at 20% | €8,000.00 |
| Result after tax | €32,000.00 |
| Maximum reserve (÷ 1.10) | €29,090.91 |
| Levy at 10% | €2,909.09 |
The reserve and the levy come to €32,000 exactly, which is the whole result. Ask for more than the maximum and you get the limit back. Leave the amount blank and Financica constitutes the maximum. Constitute it twice and the second attempt is refused, because a year can only have one.
A few more things worth noting:
- Each year gets its own reserve account, taking the first free code under 133. FIFO applies on distribution, and the withholding rate depends on the vintage's age. A pooled account leaves the rate undeterminable and the 275A annex short. The CNC/CBN advice on the accounting treatment of the liquidation reserve recommends the same year-by-year split.
- The levy is charged in the year the reserve is made. Belgian annual accounts are drawn up after appropriation, so the levy has to sit inside the figure being appropriated. It goes on a sub-account of 6702 so the 67 prefix puts it on the income taxes line of your statements. It is not deductible, under article 198 §1, 1°.
Financica does not compute the withholding due when you later distribute the reserve, and it does not produce the 275A annex. The vintage accounts make the rate determinable later. Constituting the reserve is a multi-year commitment with a real cost if you distribute early, and that decision belongs with your accountant.
Undoing either entry
Both entries carry a marker. Undo deletes the transaction that was posted. There is no reversing entry left in the year.
Undo only touches entries it posted, so it cannot become a general delete button. It refuses on a locked period. If you want the year fixed, lock it, and if you want a dated reversal instead of a deletion, post one yourself before locking.
The annual accounts file
The file comes from Reports > Year-end close, once the blocking checks are clear.
A few things are asked for that no ledger holds:
The date the general meeting approved the accounts. The filing is due within 30 days of that date and at most 7 months after the closing date. The National Bank rejects a meeting date that does not fit the exercise.
Your valuation rules. A summary is a mandatory part of the model. Financica offers standard wording as a starting point, which you should edit to match how you actually value stock, receivables and fixed assets.
The filing language. Annual accounts are drawn up in the language of the region your registered office is in, and Financica sets it from your postal code. Brussels can file in French or in Dutch, so you pick. Changing the language rewrites the standard valuation rules in that language. If you have already edited them, your text is left alone.
Your average staff in full-time equivalents, one of the three criteria that decide which model you file.
The appropriation is not read from your ledger
You state the appropriation. Annual accounts are filed after appropriation, and your ledger holds the year as posted, which is the position before the general meeting decided anything.
This matters for what you file next. Reserves and dividends you state here move out of the carried-forward result in the file, and doing so posts nothing to your ledger. Only the liquidation reserve, booked above, is in both. If the meeting sets aside anything else or declares a dividend, post that yourself so your next opening balance agrees with what you filed.
The arithmetic is checked before you upload
The National Bank publishes its arithmetic checks as part of the taxonomy, in machine-readable form. Financica runs them against your figures locally. You see an arithmetic failure before you upload instead of getting a rejection code back.
These are the National Bank's own equations, down to the detail lines beneath each subtotal. Your contribution has to equal its available and unavailable parts. Your income statement result has to match the one carried in equity.
This covers the arithmetic, not everything the Filing application validates. It also checks the structure of the instance and its conformity to the taxonomy, and a file can still be refused on those grounds.
Where a check cannot be run, Financica reports it as not run. Checks belonging to sections a micro filing does not have, such as the social balance sheet, are counted separately from checks your filing simply gave nothing to test.
What it does not do
Financica produces the micro model for companies without capital. Micro means you exceed at most one of 10 employees, €700,000 turnover and €350,000 balance sheet total. That is a narrower class than "small", and a small company above those limits files the abridged model, which Financica does not yet produce. You are told which model applies before anything is generated.
Financica does not submit for you. There is no filing API at the National Bank; the Filing application is a web upload. You download the file, upload it there, and pay the filing fee. Keep the file, because it is what you filed and it is the reference if a figure is ever queried.
Size criteria are assessed across your group. After your first financial year they are assessed over two consecutive years. Financica suggests a size from your own figures alone, so check it against your actual situation.
The tax figure is an estimate
A real return holds more than your ledger does. The corporate tax report lists what it does not cover under What this estimate does not cover: foreign income relief, separate assessments other than the one on undocumented expenses, and the finer points of the order the deduction basket is shared out in. Car deductibility and your real carried-forward losses are yours to enter.
Treat the booked charge as an estimate and have your accountant confirm it before you lock the year.
Order of operations
- Clear the blocking checks on Year-end close.
- Calculate and book the corporate tax charge.
- Decide on the liquidation reserve and book it if you want it.
- State the appropriation the general meeting decided, and post anything beyond the liquidation reserve yourself.
- Download the
.xbrland upload it to the Filing application.
Available now under Reports for organizations on the Belgian chart of accounts.