Reports > Corporate tax shows how the tax on your result is arrived at, line by line, from your own books. It is two things at once: a simulator you can run for any year, and the place you book the charge for the year you are closing.
Accessing the report
Navigate to Reports > Corporate tax. It opens on the last completed financial year. Use the date picker to look at an earlier year, or at the year you are in the middle of, to see where you are heading.
How the calculation reads
The table runs top to bottom, the way an accountant would write it out.
Result for the year before tax. Your accounting result, with the income tax accounts left out. That is deliberate: booking the tax does not change the figure the tax is calculated on, so the report gives the same answer before and after you book it.
Open the row and you get the income statement behind it — revenue, goods, services, personnel, depreciation and the rest, with your operating result — so you can check the starting figure before reading any further.
Disallowed expenses. Costs you paid but cannot deduct in full. This is a list of your own accounts, not a set of boxes to fill in: fines at 100%, restaurant costs at 31%, reception costs and business gifts at 50%, taken from the standard Belgian codes. Only accounts that actually moved during the year appear.
The percentage belongs to the account, not to the report. Click it to change it and it is saved on the account, so every year from then on uses it. That is how you handle an account of your own — if you book client lunches to an account you created, set 31% on it once and it is treated correctly from then on.
Car accounts are listed without a percentage, because the deductible share depends on each car's CO₂ emissions and when it was bought. Your books do not know that, so we ask rather than guess, and the line adds nothing until you set it. Vans, bikes and motorcycles are not limited at all and are never listed.
Deductions. Losses carried forward, dividends received, innovation income and the investment deduction. The loss figure is proposed from your accumulated accounting loss, which is a starting point: your tax losses are their own history and your accountant will know the real number.
Taxable base and rate. Small companies pay 20% on the first €100,000 and 25% above it. Three conditions have to hold, and the report tells you which one is missing when the reduced rate does not apply. The usual one is the director's remuneration: at least €45,000 a year for financial years up to 2025, €50,000 from 2026, or at least your taxable result if that is lower.
If your company is young, two reliefs apply and the report applies them for you. The remuneration condition only starts from your fifth financial year, so a company in its first four years gets the reduced rate even with no director's pay at all. And 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.
One catch worth knowing: 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, not from the company's incorporation. You may have used the window up already.
Surcharge. Belgium charges a surcharge when too little tax was prepaid during the year. Each quarterly prepayment cancels part of it, and money paid earlier cancels more. Your prepayments are read from account 412. Unlike private individuals, companies get no small-amount exemption: even a few euros of surcharge is due.
Simulating
Every figure the report proposes can be typed over, right in the line it belongs to. The whole chain recalculates as you type, so you see the effect immediately. Where you have overridden something, the report shows what your books said underneath, with one click to put it back.
The scenario lives in the address bar, so you can bookmark it, send the link to your accountant, or open two years side by side in different tabs. Reset to the books clears everything and returns to what your ledger says. Nothing is saved until you book the charge.
This is what makes the report useful before the year is over: run it in September on the year in progress, and you can still act on what it tells you.
What would move this
Underneath the calculation, the report prices the decisions that are still open:
- Your remuneration is below the reduced-rate threshold. It shows what topping it up would cost and what it would save in corporate tax. Your own income tax and social contributions on that extra pay are not counted, so weigh both sides.
- The surcharge is avoidable. It shows how much to prepay and by which deadline. Once the last quarterly deadline of the year has passed, it says so instead.
- Losses held back by the basket rule. These are not lost; they stay available against later years.
- Profit above the reduced-rate band. The part taxed at the full rate, and what that costs.
Booking the charge
When the figure is right, Book posts the entry: the estimated tax charge against the matching payable, dated at your year end.
Nothing is posted when you press it. You get the exact entry first, and only when you confirm is it booked. It stays undoable afterwards, so you can look at the result and change your mind. Booking it clears the No corporate income tax booked on a profitable year check on the year-end close.
This is an estimate
A real tax return has more in it than your ledger does. The 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 basket is shared out in. Treat the figure as a well-founded provision, and have your accountant confirm it before you file.