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.
Receivables or payables do not match the open invoices. Your receivables and payables accounts should carry exactly the invoices still open on the closing date. When they do not, a payment was usually linked for the wrong amount, a credit note was applied twice, or something was posted on the account by hand. The check shows the gap per account; compare the account's ledger with the open invoice list at the same date. A payment made before the closing date on an invoice dated after it is an advance: it may stay on the account or be moved to advances paid (406) or received (46), and the check accepts either.
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.
The sign-off page also asks what the general meeting decided to do with the result: the dividend, what goes to the legal reserve, what goes to other reserves. Whatever is left is carried forward. The annual accounts and the corporate tax return both read that decision, so it is asked once.
Locking the year
A filing states figures that must not move afterwards. Once every other check is cleared, Close the accounting period (or Lock the year) asks for a date, set to the last day of the financial year, and closes every month up to it that is still open, including any earlier month left open: no entry can be added, changed or deleted in a closed month, whether by hand, by an import or by a bank sync. Closing is an administrator's action. If something has to be corrected, reopen from a month in Settings > Accounting, which reopens that month and every later one in one go, at the cost of producing the filings again.
Closing the last month alone is not enough. An entry dated in an open January changes the same annual accounts, so the check counts every month of the year.
Filings
Below the checklist, Filings lists the three files a closed year hands over, each with what it still needs:
- Annual accounts, the XBRL you deposit with the NBB Filing application. Needs the sign-off and the lock. Once the National Bank has published the year, the card shows its deposit and every correction after it, and its … menu prepares a correction.
- Corporate tax return, the
.biztaxfile you upload to Biztax. Needs the sign-off, the lock, the tax charge booked, the tax scenario from the corporate tax report, and the general meeting minutes as a PDF. - Client listing, the annual listing of Belgian VAT customers. It covers a calendar year and is due by 31 March, so it needs neither the sign-off nor the lock, and it has a page of its own as well. Its card offers the XML as a download and records the listing as filed (or not required) with your VAT filings; Financica keeps no copy of its file.
Produce and record builds the file from your books, keeps a copy of it, and offers it for download. That copy is what you filed: it stays downloadable from the card, with who produced it and when. Producing a file again replaces the copy, which is what you want after reopening a month to correct something, and never what happens by accident: it asks first.