Belgian VAT filers have a current account with the tax authority. It carries your declarations, the payments you make, the refunds you receive, and any late interest or fines. The authority publishes it as a periodic PDF statement (Extrait de compte TVA / Uittreksel btw-rekening), and there is no API for it.
Financica treats those statements exactly like a bank feed: you upload the PDF, and every operation on it can be booked to the ledger against your VAT current account.
Accessing the VAT account
Navigate to Data Sources > VAT account.
Uploading statements
Drop the statement PDFs into the upload zone, or click it to pick files. Several files can be imported in one go, and each is limited to 10 MB. Statements issued in French or Dutch are both read, as are the older layouts the authority used before the current one.
Each import stores the PDF (visible under the Files tab, where you can download it again) and extracts the operations. The Account history tab then shows one continuous timeline across all your statements, newest first:
- Effect date — the date the operation takes effect, which is the date interest runs from. When the administration registered it noticeably later, the registration date is shown underneath.
- Operation — what it is (declaration, payment, reimbursement, late interest, fine, correction), and for a declaration, the period it covers. Click a row to expand the full detail, including the raw operation code and the statement it arrived on.
- Change — the movement, signed from the account's point of view: positive is in your favour, negative is against you.
- Balance — the running balance after the operation, with the word for which way it points.
Above the table, a summary card shows the balance on the most recent statement, its date, and the structured communication to use when paying.
If the timeline detects that statements are missing between two you imported, it says so on the line where the balance jumps. Import the missing statement to close the gap.
How operations reach your books
Importing a statement posts it. There is no separate step: each operation on the file becomes a ledger transaction as it arrives, with one leg on the VAT current account (4512), and the other leg depends on what the operation is:
- Declarations close the period. The declaration sweeps your VAT control accounts, at the amount the administration actually registered, and is dated at the end of the period it declares rather than the date it was registered (which falls into the following period).
- Payments and refunds land on Money in Transit, where they meet the same movement arriving on your bank statement. A leftover balance there means one of the two sides is still missing.
- Late interest and fines go to their own expense accounts.
- Corrections and regularizations, and any code Financica does not recognise, go to the VAT discrepancy account, because the statement alone does not say what they adjust.
Operations that fall in a locked accounting period are skipped rather than forced in, and nothing posts at all until your VAT current account is configured.
Post to books, on the summary card, is the catch-up for whatever the import skipped. It appears only while operations are left to post and says how many that is. Use it after you reopen a locked period, after you finish configuring the accounts, or for statements imported before Financica posted on import.
Posting is idempotent
Every posted operation is claimed against the statement it came from, identified by the statement's form reference and the operation's position on it. Posting again, posting a statement that was imported before this feature existed, or re-uploading a statement you already have, adds nothing. You never need to re-import a PDF to fix a posting.
Matching a payment to its bank line
A payment or refund posted from a statement sits on Money in Transit until the matching bank transaction cancels it. Where Financica finds that bank line, the history row links to it. Where it does not, the row offers Match the bank line, which opens the candidates (same amount, near the statement date) and lets you search the rest of the ledger; Match on a candidate takes it. Matching moves the bank line's counter-leg onto the clearing account, so the two sides net to zero.
The VAT discrepancy account
VAT discrepancy (to review) should always read zero.
The current-account leg is the administration's figure; the control-account sweep is what your books computed. When a declaration was registered at a different amount than your books expected, the difference lands on this account. Because it is an ordinary account, it shows up on your trial balance instead of being a warning somewhere you have to remember to read.
Anything sitting on it is a real question: a missing invoice, a correction you filed, or a figure that went out wrong. Investigate it and book the correcting entry, rather than clearing the account.
Statements versus closing from the VAT return
Closing a period can also be done from the VAT return page, with Close the period. That posts the same shape of entry from your own figures, and exists for the case where the authority's statement has not arrived yet.
Posting from the statement is the better route: it books what the administration recorded, not what your books computed, and it brings the payments, refunds, interest and fines along with the declaration. See VAT returns for the return itself and for the manual close.
Removing a statement
Under the Files tab, the row menu offers Undo & delete. The name overpromises: it deletes the imported statement, its operations and its entry under Files, but it does not touch your books. The transactions posted from the statement stay in the ledger, each one still holding its claim on the statement line it came from, and the PDF itself is retained in storage.
Because those claims survive, importing the same statement again brings the account history back but posts nothing: the original transactions stand, wrong or right.
To correct a statement that was posted wrongly, start from the ledger. Find its transactions under Transactions — they carry the statement's form reference — and delete them. Deleting a transaction releases its claim, so the operations can be posted again: press Post to books if you kept the statement, or delete it and import the correct file.