Jaarrekening.be
Your CRM needs to fill in the official name and address of every new customer. Your credit policy wants the latest figures for every debtor without anyone retyping them. Or you are building a product that shows Belgian companies. Then you do not want to look the data up, you want to pull it in automatically. In Belgium there are three ways to do that, each with its own price in money and in maintenance.
The short answer
- CBE Open Data
- Free, daily CSV
- NBB web services
- Annual accounts, basics free
- Processed API
- CBE, figures and ratios in one
What do you actually need?
The choice depends less on technology than on three questions.
- Identity or figures? Name, address, legal form, legal situation and activity are in the CBE. Equity, profit and debt are in the annual accounts at the National Bank. The CBE holds no figures, the National Bank no complete identity record.
- All companies or yours? If you want the whole country in your own database, you look at files. If you follow a few thousand customers or look up a company when a user asks for it, one query per company is enough.
- Raw or processed? Annual accounts are a list of item codes in one of several schemes. If you want a solvency ratio or a Health score, someone has to read those codes and calculate: your developers, or your supplier.
Three ways to get CBE data
The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, run by FPS Economy, makes its public data available for reuse in three ways. What is and is not in the CBE is covered in CBE enterprise number lookup.
| Service | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CBE Open Data | CSV files with the active data of all active companies and establishment units. A full file and an update file every day, each available for 31 days. | Free, after registration |
| Public Search web service | Queries per company in your own application: by number, name, address, activity or licence. New or changed data is available the next day. | Free account, after registration |
| Full file for reuse | Detailed data on active and ceased companies. A full file every month, the changes every day. On application and under a licence agreement. | Free for non-commercial use, EUR 30,000 a year for commercial use |
CBE Open Data is the best-known route, and enough for many applications. Do count on work on your side. The file consists of several CSV tables (companies, addresses, names, activities, contact details) that you link yourself through the enterprise number, with codes that you translate through a separate code table. You have to load the updates every day, because a file stays online for only 31 days: miss a month and you start again from the full file. And Open Data only contains active companies: a company that ceases drops out of the file, with no history.
Annual accounts from the National Bank
The National Bank's Central Balance Sheet Office offers web services to professional users. You sign up with a form, your technical user creates a profile on the developer portal and, once approved, the product is linked to your key. The main products:
- Query authentic data (free): per enterprise number, first the list of filings (the references), then the documents for each filing. Those are the PDF, the XBRL file for filings from 2007 and, for XBRL filings since April 2022, a JSON document with the items and the shareholdings.
- Daily extract of authentic data (free): all filings published on a given day, as zip files with PDFs, XBRL and JSON. The files are not cumulative and stay available for a limited period.
- Improved data (EUR 3,300 a year): what the National Bank improved itself. PDF filings converted into structured data, filings in foreign currency converted into euros, and corrections to the accounting data.
That gives you the official source, but not yet figures you can show on a screen. You read the item codes, and these differ between the micro, abbreviated and full schemes and the models for non-profit associations (VZW/ASBL). A company can file its annual accounts again, and then you need to know which version counts. Filings submitted only as PDF are not structured without the paid product. You calculate the ratios yourself. And you link every filing to the CBE data, because the National Bank does not supply the address, activity or legal situation the way the CBE does.
Read also How to find a company's annual accounts in Belgium, and what they showA processed API
The third route is an API that has already linked and processed the sources. You query a company and get identity, figures and ratios in one response, without loading files or translating item codes yourself. You pay per request rather than in development time, and you depend on how that supplier processes the data.
What the Jaarrekening.be API returns
Every day, Jaarrekening.be loads the changes in the CBE, the new filings at the National Bank and the publications in the Belgian Official Gazette. The API returns the same data you see on the company pages, for Belgian companies:
| Endpoint | What you get |
|---|---|
| /v1/search | Search like the search bar on the site: tolerant of typos and word order, up to 50 results. Useful to work out which company a user means. |
| /v1/enterprises | A paginated list by name or enterprise number. |
| /v1/enterprises/{number} | Name, legal form, legal situation, start date, main activity, address and contact details, with the key figures and ratios from the latest annual accounts: equity, profit, EBITDA, solvency, current ratio, customer credit, Health score and credit limit. |
| /financials | The figures for each filed set of annual accounts, optionally limited to certain financial years. |
| /directors | The directors as listed in the annual accounts. |
| /investments and /investors | The company's shareholdings in other companies, and the companies that hold shares in it, insofar as they list them as a shareholding in their own annual accounts. |
| /activities, /establishments, /publications, /lookalikes | The NACE activities, the establishment units, the publications in the Belgian Official Gazette and comparable companies. |
You authenticate with a token you create under Settings, API. With the lang parameter you get codes such as legal form and legal situation in English, Dutch or French. The full description is in the API documentation.
What it costs
Every plan has a monthly allowance of requests, which resets on the first of the month. A team shares one allowance.
- 10
- requests a month with a free account
- 500
- requests a month with Starter
- 2,500
- requests a month with Pro
If you need more, you buy a package: 25,000 requests for EUR 2,500, 50,000 for EUR 4,000 or 100,000 for EUR 6,000, excluding VAT. Purchased requests do not expire and are only used once the monthly allowance is gone. For larger volumes you ask for a custom proposal. When everything is used up, the API responds with code 429 and the date the allowance resets. The plans are on the pricing page.
The three routes side by side
| CBE (Open Data, Public Search) | NBB web services | Processed API | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content | Identity, address, activity, situation | Annual accounts per filing | Both, plus ratios, directors and publications |
| Format | CSV tables or query per company | PDF, XBRL, JSON with item codes | JSON per company, already processed |
| Cost | Free, full commercial file EUR 30,000 a year | Free, improved data EUR 3,300 a year | Per request |
| Work on your side | Load daily, link tables, translate codes | Read XBRL or JSON per scheme, manage versions, calculate ratios, link to the CBE | Send requests and keep an eye on the allowance |
| Suited to | Your own register of all companies | Analysing the annual accounts yourself | Company data in a CRM, credit policy or product |
Terms and personal data
Public data does not come without rules. Read the terms before you build, because they decide what you may do with the data.
- No direct marketing with personal data from the CBE. For all three CBE services, FPS Economy states that personal data may not be reused for direct marketing. This applies in particular to all data on companies that are natural persons, such as sole traders.
- The GDPR applies to names. A director or manager is a natural person, even when their name appears in public annual accounts. Anyone storing or using names needs a legal basis and has to respect those people's rights.
- Licence and registration. CBE Open Data and Public Search require registration and acceptance of terms of use. The full CBE file requires a licence agreement. The NBB web services have their own subscription terms.
- A supplier's terms. At Jaarrekening.be you may display and process the retrieved data within your own product or internal systems. Reselling access, sharing your key with third parties or republishing substantial parts of the database as a competing product is not allowed. Systematically pulling data from the website with scripts is prohibited; that is what the API is for.
Build or buy?
-
Do you only need identity data?
Then the CBE is enough. Public Search for queries per company, Open Data if you want all companies in your own database and someone can follow up the daily updates. -
Do you want to analyse the annual accounts yourself?
Then you get them from the National Bank. Set aside development time to read XBRL or JSON per scheme and to link them to the CBE, and take Improved data if you also want the PDF filings in structured form. -
Do you want ready-made figures and ratios for a company?
Then a processed API usually costs less than building it yourself. Count how many companies you query a month: hundreds fit in a monthly allowance, tens of thousands in a package. -
Test first
A free account gives you 10 requests a month. Enough to check whether the fields match what your software needs, before you choose a plan or package.
Summary
Belgian company data is public, and the official sources provide it free of charge: the CBE the identity, the National Bank the annual accounts. What they do not provide is the work that follows: loading files every day, reading item codes per scheme, calculating ratios and linking everything together. If you would rather not do that yourself, you fetch it processed through an API and pay per request. Whichever route you choose, the rule on personal data applies everywhere: no direct marketing with data on people from the CBE.