Van Hooff Accountancy & Fiscaliteit

Zakenkantoor Van Hooff is an accounting office on Torenplein in Oelegem, in the municipality of Ranst, in the province of Antwerp. The firm reports forty years of experience and sums up its positioning in a phrase it puts forward: doing more than bookkeeping alone. It adds an expression uncommon in the profession, relaxed professionalism, which describes a way of receiving clients as much as a working method.

The first service announced is advice for start-ups, and the office puts it at the top rather than the bottom of the list. It starts from a simple observation: launching a business concentrates a large number of decisions, and those choices bind for a long time. The legal form, the VAT regime, social security affiliation and how the owner is paid are all settled in the first weeks and are hard to correct afterwards.

Accounting is presented without flourish: trading successfully starts with correct books, correct meaning compliant with accounting and tax obligations. The office offers to take that over entirely. That modest wording covers the core of the trade, keeping the books, VAT returns and preparing the annual accounts.

The tax strand opens with a direct remark: Belgium is a country of taxes, between corporate income tax, personal income tax and VAT, and there is no escaping those obligations. The question the firm poses is how to keep the tax burden within reasonable limits, which places the exercise on the side of lawful optimisation rather than a promise of avoidance.

Two areas complete the offering. Financial planning supports investment and structural decisions, and legal advice covers the questions surrounding the life of a company. Bringing those two strands together at the accountant spares the owner from coordinating several providers on one file, which is precisely where information gets lost.

Forty years in business places the firm in a category where succession becomes a question. In the Belgian accounting profession, a large share of practices are run by practitioners nearing retirement, and the portfolio is usually sold to a peer rather than handed on internally. For a client the consequence is direct: continuity of their file depends on how that step was prepared. A practice displaying such a long run has necessarily lived through at least one succession, which is in itself reassuring about its ability to organise another.

The office works with Octopus and offers online appointment booking. The client base brings together self-employed professionals, small companies and companies being formed around Antwerp and the western Kempen. For a business in that area, the appeal lies less in a speciality than in duration: a practice present for forty years has seen several tax reforms and economic cycles, and that memory counts when a question concerns a decision taken fifteen years ago.