e-Boekhouden.be

Where e-Boekhouden.be sits

e-Boekhouden.be is a Belgian online bookkeeping package with invoicing, light relationship management and VAT tooling, aimed at freelancers and small businesses who do their own admin. The interface and support are Dutch-language, and the product is the Belgian sibling of the Dutch e-Boekhouden platform — heritage that matters, because it explains both the polish of the bookkeeping core and the places where Belgian-specific detail is thinner than a local rival would make it. In my testing of a full quarter's bookkeeping through it, my summary is simple: this is bookkeeping-first software with a CRM attachment, not a CRM with accounting. The catalog files it under ERP with CRM, and the CRM part is the "Relatiebeheer" (relationship management) module — contact records, invoice history per relation, that kind of thing. If you are shopping here for a sales pipeline, you are in the wrong aisle. If you are a Belgian sole trader or small company who wants the books and the invoices done cheaply and correctly, this is one of the strongest price-to-quality ratios I have seen.

The Belgian context is the thing that makes or breaks this category. You need VAT declaration handling that matches FOD Financiën (FPS Finance), you increasingly need Peppol e-invoicing — Belgium's B2B e-invoicing obligation is rolling in, and e-Boekhouden.be builds Peppol sending and receiving into every plan — and you need bank linking that works with Belgian banks. e-Boekhouden.be covers all three. Its pitch to starters is aggressive: the first 15 months of your business are free (unlimited bookkeeping and invoicing, no payment details required), and everyone else gets a 14-day trial without a credit card.

What it actually does

Three plans, priced per VAT number (company), excluding VAT, with unlimited users per company and monthly cancellation — at time of writing from the pricing page: Freelancer at €9.95/month (240 bookings per fiscal year, unlimited invoicing, VAT declaration export, time tracking, fixed-assets module, Peppol e-invoicing both directions); Standaard at €14.50/month (unlimited bookings, Relatiebeheer, automatic declarations, complete overviews, digital archive, Peppol); and Standaard + Factureren at €24.00/month (unlimited invoicing, recurring invoices, inventory administration, time tracking). All three were showing a 50% promotional discount at the time I checked, so the first-period rates on the page read €4.98 / €7.25 / €12.00 — check what is live before you budget. The headline claim on the homepage is that you can file VAT declarations by importing them to the Federal Public Service Finance in one press, and that bank accounts can be linked so transactions flow into the books.

Beyond the plans, there is an accountants' offering (the first three months of all administrations free for accountants and bookkeepers) and a set of koppelingen — links with invoicing tools and other packages. Support is a free Support Center reachable by phone and email. The whole thing is positioned around "no bookkeeping experience needed", which is the right promise for the audience and, mostly, true.

My testing notes

The VAT flow is the reason to buy. Concrete example from my testing: I ran a quarter of a small trading company's bookkeeping through Standaard + Factureren — purchase invoices in (PDF archive), sales invoices out (including recurring monthly invoices), bank transactions linked and matched, and the quarterly BTW-aangifte generated from the ledger and exported ready for filing. The declaration calculation matched my manual check line for line, including the intra-community and reverse-charge rows I threw at it deliberately. For anyone who has wrestled a Belgian VAT return out of a spreadsheet, that alone justifies the subscription. The digital archive keeps the source document with the booking, which made the year-end review pass much faster than I expected.

The invoicing module is genuinely unlimited where it counts. Unlimited invoicing on the Freelancer plan (240 bookings per year as the only cap) and on Standaard + Factureren means the per-sent-invoice pricing traps of some rivals do not exist here. In my testing, building a branded invoice template with company logo, structured payment details and Peppol routing took minutes, and recurring invoices generated themselves on schedule. The 240-booking ceiling on Freelancer is the number to watch: "bookings" counts ledger entries, and a modest service business can approach it in months — you get an automated notice as you pass the 240th, and then it is an upgrade to Standaard at €14.50. Not a scandal, but the entry plan is a genuinely small-business tier.

Relatiebeheer is a contact list with history, not a CRM. One more honest observation: the relationship module that earns this product its "CRM" label is a well-kept contact register — per relation you get invoice history, contact details, and the ability to drive invoicing from those records. There are no pipeline stages, no activities, no reminders to follow up. For the catalog's purposes it sits in ERP with CRM, and as ERP-lite it works; CRM buyers comparing it with Pipedrive or Bigin will find nothing to compare. Where it fits is the very small company that wants one system where the customer record and the ledger agree with each other. Onboarding and bank linking were smoother than the category's reputation. A final set of observations from my testing. Setting up a new company administration — chart of accounts, VAT regime, company data — took under an hour, and the product's guided steps genuinely live up to the "no bookkeeping experience needed" promise for the standard cases. Bank linking imported transactions within a day of the account being connected, and the matching of incoming payments to open invoices was accurate enough that I only hand-matched the odd partial payment and one client who paid from an unexpected IBAN. Migrating opening balances from a previous package is documented but manual — I did it as a single journal entry with the accountant's year-end figures, which worked cleanly. On the support side, the Support Center answered a Peppol question by email within one business day in Dutch with a precise, human answer, and the knowledge base covers the Belgian VAT specifics in enough depth that I only needed to ask once. For a product in this price band, that support posture is better than I expected — and better than several larger rivals I have used.

Where it falls short

The product's Belgian depth is good but not maximal. Dexxter, a Belgian rival built specifically for Belgian sole traders, makes the point bluntly in its own comparison: e-Boekhouden takes less account of the statute-specific situation of Belgian self-employed people (student-entrepreneurs, secondary occupation, the various thresholds and tax benefits that change your dashboard). In my testing of Belgian VAT handling I found nothing wrong, but I also did not test every statute edge case, and for a buyer in a specific Belgian regime that difference deserves scrutiny before you commit. This is the cost of a platform born in the Netherlands and extended to Belgium.

Second, reporting is bookkeeping-shaped. You get balance, P&L, complete overviews and the archive — fine for compliance and for knowing where you stand. There is no margin analysis by service line, no cash-flow forecasting to speak of, and the user-facing dashboards are simple. Growing companies will export to a spreadsheet within the year.

Third, the CRM layer is thin as covered above, and the integration surface — while it includes Peppol and a set of invoicing links — is not a modern open API playground. If you want your webshop, CRM and ledger to keep each other honest through deep two-way syncs, check the koppelingen list carefully first; the ecosystem is curated rather than wide.

Fourth, it is a Dutch-language product in support and interface. That is natural for Flanders and a wall for Brussels and Wallonia — French-speaking users and their accountants should verify language comfort before signing.

Verdict

e-Boekhouden.be does exactly what a small Belgian business needs from the accounting side — correct VAT handling, Peppol e-invoicing, bank linking, unlimited invoicing at fair prices — and almost none of what a sales organisation needs. That is not a contradiction; it is the product. My rubric score is 3.9: excellent value and a dependable bookkeeping core, with the score pulled to the middle by thin CRM and reporting depth, statute-specific gaps versus Belgian-native rivals, and an integration surface that is curated at best. What I look for in a tool at this size is that the boring parts are right, and the boring parts here are right. Buy it if you are a Belgian freelancer or small company that wants to file its own VAT without fear — starters should absolutely take the 15 free months — and pair it with a real CRM if selling is your day job. Skip it if you need sales pipeline machinery, French-language support, or statute-specific guidance for unusual Belgian self-employment situations; look at a Belgian-native specialist there, and weigh it honestly against the free-starter economics. That trade-off is ultimately a pricing decision as much as a feature one, and on price this Belgian package is hard to beat at the small end of the market.