ADFIBO ACCOUNTANTS

Adfibo Accountants is an accounting practice on Namenstraat in Antwerp. It was founded in March 1994 and is registered with the ITAA under number 50.070.285. Its founder, Julien Hermans, was appointed accountant in 1985 and had previously worked as a senior manager at one of the four large audit firms in Antwerp. That background partly explains the structure of the office, which applies reporting methods inherited from a more formal environment to small-company files.

The firm grew by acquisition as much as by its own development. In December 2002 it took over Marcel Van Riel's accountancy division; in January 2005 it integrated a full trust activity into its Merksem office. That way of growing is common in the Belgian profession, where retirements are often settled by transferring the portfolio, and it has a practical consequence for the clients concerned: continuity of the file runs through the takeover, or through a change of office imposed on them.

The engagement as the firm frames it rests on two commitments. The first is digital bookkeeping kept up regularly rather than caught up at the year end. The second is an explicit reporting rhythm: on top of the annual report, the office announces at least one interim statement a year, with quality reporting intended to feed the advice. That quantified commitment is useful because it can be checked, where most practices settle for announcing regular follow-up without naming a frequency.

Services cover bookkeeping, VAT and tax returns, and the preparation of the annual accounts. The office distinguishes internal from external clients, meaning files whose books it keeps itself and files where it acts only as adviser or reviewer. That distinction, rarely displayed, lets a company with its own accounting department call on the firm without handing over data entry.

The team is published by name with each person's qualification, which remains uncommon. Sven Meyers, senior partner, appears as a certified tax accountant, alongside equally certified file managers, a trainee accountant and accounting staff. That make-up points to an office structured in tiers, where a file passes through a dedicated manager before a partner's review, and where succession is organised by training a trainee.

On tooling, the firm relies on Silverfin for accounts production and reporting, and on a document portal for the flow of paperwork. The client base brings together self-employed professionals and small and mid-sized companies in the Antwerp area. For a business looking for both a long-established practice and a reporting rhythm above the legal minimum, this combination of seniority and an explicit commitment on interim statements is a solid footing.