Before a financial year can be approved and its annual accounts filed, the ledger has to be clean: nothing left uncategorized, nothing sitting on a clearing account, and the year's tax charge booked. Reports > Year-end close works that list out for you from your own books.
Accessing the report
Navigate to Reports > Year-end close. It opens on the last completed financial year, which is normally the one you are closing. The picker offers financial years and nothing else: a close is about a year, and running the checks over an arbitrary date would report on a period your accounts will never be filed for.
The year you are currently in is offered too. Selecting it reports that it has not ended, and holds back the three entries the close posts until it has.
How to read it
Each item is one check, run against your ledger. Nothing is stored: correct an entry and the check clears itself the next time you open the page. That also means a check can come back if something is posted into the year later.
Checks come in two kinds:
- Blocking — your statutory accounts would be wrong, or your annual accounts filing would be rejected. These have to be cleared.
- Review — something needs your decision. It may turn out to be perfectly correct, but you should look before signing off.
Checks that pass, and checks that do not apply to you, are collapsed at the bottom under Cleared.
Every check takes you to where it is fixed. When it names accounts, each account is a link to that account's ledger, already filtered to the period the amount was read over: the financial year for a result account, everything up to the closing date for a balance sheet account. Checks about invoices, assets or the period lock carry a button to the list concerned.
What is checked
This fiscal year has not ended. You are looking at a year that is still running. Nothing final can be posted to it: there is no closing result to tax, no closing position to revalue and nothing to file. The three checks that would post those are set aside until the year is over, rather than offering you a button that books an entry too early. You can still book the tax charge deliberately from the corporate tax report, which warns you before it posts.
Uncategorized accounts still hold amounts. Anything left on an uncategorized account has to be moved to a real account. Until it is, your result and your expense analysis mean nothing.
Accounts with no line in the statutory model. These accounts carry an amount but their code does not match any line of the statutory model, so they end up in an "unclassified" bucket on your balance sheet or income statement, and the filing is refused. Give them a proper account code. This most often catches an account created on the fly, which gets a name but no code.
Off balance sheet accounts carry a residual balance. Off-balance accounts appear on neither the balance sheet nor the income statement, so a leftover balance quietly puts your accounts out of balance.
Invoices you issued, dated up to the year end, that are not posted. An unposted invoice is simply not in your books, so the revenue and the matching receivable are missing. The check links to the list, so you can go straight to the invoices concerned. Zero-total invoices you have marked as No charge are not counted: there is nothing for them to post.
Invoices you received, dated up to the year end, that are not posted. Same thing on the purchase side: the cost and the matching payable are missing.
No corporate income tax booked on a profitable year. Belgian annual accounts are filed after profit appropriation, so the tax charge and the estimated tax payable have to be booked before you can produce them.
Invoices still open at the year end. Every receivable and payable still open on the closing date should be justified, and anything you will not collect should be written down.
Accounts with a balance on the unexpected side. A customer account in credit or a supplier account in debit usually means a payment was matched to the wrong entry.
No exchange rate for a currency in the books. Your statements convert each foreign amount at the European Central Bank reference rate of its own entry date. When no rate can be found for a currency, those amounts are left unconverted and your totals cannot be relied on.
No depreciation booked on the registered fixed assets. You have assets in the register but no depreciation for the year.
The fiscal year is not locked. The last step: once the figures are final, close the period so they cannot move afterwards. This one is blocking, because a filing states figures that cannot move: locking first is what makes what you deposit provably match your books.
Booking the tax
No corporate income tax booked on a profitable year links to the corporate tax report, where the charge is calculated line by line and booked. That is the only place it is posted, so a booked figure always has a visible calculation behind it.
Together with the foreign currency revaluation, it is one of only two checks that post anything for you. The others take you to the entries concerned but stop there, on purpose. Which account an uncategorized payment belongs to, or whether a supplier balance on the wrong side is a misapplied payment or a genuine advance, is a decision only you can make. A button that guessed would put a wrong entry into a year you are about to file.
Asking the assistant
The AI assistant can run the same checks and talk you through them. Ask it something like "what do I still need to do to close 2025?" and it will return the same list with the amounts and the accounts involved.
Signing off
At the foot of the page, a bar counts how many checks are cleared and how many are still blocking. Sign off the year becomes available once nothing is blocking. Items to review are counted separately and never hold it shut: those are your judgement to make, and you may decide they are fine as they are.
Signing off opens a page of its own, where you state the things your books cannot know — when the general meeting approved the accounts, the language and court the filing names, your valuation rules, your average staff — and then run the statutory checks the National Bank of Belgium publishes. See filing your annual accounts.
Before you get there, produce your balance sheet and income statement for the year and have them approved. Belgian companies file with the National Bank of Belgium within thirty days of the general meeting's approval, and at the latest seven months after the end of the financial year.