ABC Verhelst Accountancy

ABC Verhelst is an accounting practice whose Antwerp office is on Justitiestraat, with two others in Ypres and Dadizele, in West Flanders. The firm describes itself as an all-round office covering bookkeeping, accountancy, tax and advice, with a promise in two terms it puts forward: expert advice and a personal approach.

The geographic spread is the structural feature. Antwerp on one side, southern West Flanders on the other, a hundred and fifty kilometres apart: these are not two branches of the same catchment but two distinct markets, one metropolitan and port-driven, the other industrial and rural. Holding both implies an organisation where the file does not depend on where the client drops off their paperwork.

The offering is presented in four clearly separated strands. Accounting comes first, and the firm frames it from the client's point of view rather than its own: the self-employed person, the independent professional or the company director works hard, and the office's role is to ensure their books are in order at any moment of the year, not only at the year-end.

That detail about "any moment of the year" is what separates useful accounting from caught-up accounting. A file kept as things happen allows a cash or VAT question to be answered the day it arises; a file caught up at the year-end never does.

The second strand is tax, the third advice for small companies, and the fourth administration. That last one deserves attention: few practices separate administrative support as a service in its own right, although it is often the burden a director most wants to shed, ahead even of the bookkeeping.

The firm publishes a tax calendar, a news section and a page of useful links to the tax authorities, the enterprise register, NACE codes and the accounting standards commission. That last page says something about the practice: an office that points to the accounting standards commission works with the framework, not only with the software.

A word on what the published tax calendar reveals about how the office works. Belgian deadlines are numerous and staggered: monthly or quarterly VAT returns, client listings, income tax returns, advance payments spread over four quarters, filing of the annual accounts within seven months of the year-end. Missing most of them costs a fixed penalty, regardless of the amount at stake. A practice that publishes that calendar rather than keeping it internal accepts that tracking deadlines is part of the service.

Document exchange runs on Billtobox. The client base brings together self-employed people, independent professions and small companies, across both of the firm's territories. ABC Verhelst belongs to the same group as ABC Boxes, which for its part works on the client's premises for administrative support: two different answers to two needs the same director may have in turn.