KBO: Belgium VAT register

Belgium publishes KBO Open Data, a free bulk export of the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises covering every legal person on the register, VAT activities included. Avatcado mirrors it rather than querying it live, and only for companies: a check against VIES showed the register cannot be trusted for sole traders in the same way.

KBO is run by the FPS Economy, Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, and its data is published at kbopub.economie.fgov.be. It is one of the 10 national registers Avatcado consults on the Pro and Business plans when VIES cannot answer for Belgium, and it never replaces a VIES answer that does arrive. The national registry fallback guide covers the full precedence order.

What KBO publishes

• A full export of every person on the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, natural and legal, split into tables for the enterprise itself, its denominations, its addresses, its establishments, its contact details and its branches; Avatcado's mirror keeps only the legal persons
• A code list of activities in which group 001, VAT activities, marks an enterprise as VAT registered, alongside its ordinary business activity codes
• The enterprise's names in up to four languages, Dutch, French, German and English, not all of them necessarily filled in for every enterprise
• The registered office as separate fields for street, house number, box, postcode and municipality, rather than as a single formatted line

How Avatcado uses it

The full KBO Open Data export is loaded once by an operator, then a scheduled job applies the daily update files, each one a delete and insert per changed entity, so the mirror stays current without ever reprocessing the whole export. A Belgian fallback looks up the enterprise number inside the VAT number in that snapshot and answers only when the enterprise carries the VAT activities code among its registered activities, serving the result with source kbo, its preferred name and its assembled address. Sole traders are left out of the mirror entirely, so a sole trader's VAT number is simply never in the snapshot and falls through to the cache, the same as a country with no register at all.

KBO publishes a bulk file rather than a per-number service, so Avatcado mirrors it instead of calling it on your request. Snapshot refreshed 09:00 and 21:00 UTC, and each run replaces the stored snapshot. A snapshot is only trusted while it is demonstrably fresh: it has to be less than 3 days old, and the source file itself has to have changed within the last 14 days. A snapshot that fails either gate is not served at all, because a stale file is worse than no fallback.

The rule that matters most is that a register can only ever confirm a registration. A miss, whether KBO says not registered or simply has no record, is never turned into valid: false: the request falls through to the stored result instead. An answer that does come from here carries source: "kbo" and source_status: "fallback", and no consultation_number field at all, because only VIES issues those.

What a KBO answer contains

Data quirks worth knowing

• Companies only: sole traders are never answered from the snapshot and fall through to the cache
• VAT status is read from the register's VAT activities; the open data carries no VAT registration date
• Loaded once in full, then kept current from the daily update files
• The open data carries no VAT registration date, only the current list of activity codes, so a Belgian fallback answer can confirm VAT status but never say when it started
• Names are published in several languages at once, and the mirror keeps one name per enterprise by preference, Dutch first, then French, then German, then English
• Sole traders are excluded from the mirror by design: a check of 80 companies against VIES matched all 80, while the same check for VAT-registered sole traders found around 4 percent, mostly businesses trading under the small-enterprise exemption scheme, that VIES did not confirm
• Each update file replaces a changed entity wholesale, deleting and reinserting every one of its rows, rather than patching the fields that actually changed

Try it

Validating a Belgium VAT number takes the same call whichever source answers it. This one uses BE 0417.497.106, a real registered number:

curl "https://api.avatcado.com/v1/validate?vat_number=BE0417497106" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer avat_live_your_api_key"

import Avatcado from "@avatcado/node";

const avatcado = new Avatcado("avat_live_your_api_key");
const { data, error } = await avatcado.vat.validate({
  vatNumber: "BE0417497106",
});

if (data?.meta.source === "kbo") {
  // VIES was unavailable; KBO confirmed the registration.
  console.log(data.meta.source_status); // "fallback"
}

On an ordinary day that answer comes from VIES, with source_status: "live". Only when VIES cannot answer for Belgium does KBO step in, and then meta.source_status reads "fallback" and meta.source reads "kbo". The register fallback is included in the Pro and Business plans; the free tier covers 500 validations per month from VIES and the cache. Get an API key or read the API documentation.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

• Belgium VAT number format and validation
• Country coverage: what answers every country Avatcado validates
• All 10 national VAT registers
• VIES Down? How the National Registry Fallback Works
• VIES Downtime: Why It Happens and How to Handle It
• VIES API Guide: REST Endpoint, SOAP & Integration