The line most consultancies blur

How we work

Reserved means reserved

Belgium regulates more business services than many owners expect. Keeping accounts and giving tax advice for third parties is reserved to professionals registered with the ITAA; legal advice belongs to the Bar; payroll runs through an approved social secretariat; and an official translation needs a translator on the national sworn register. Each of those exists because the work carries consequences when it is done badly.

A general consultancy can still be genuinely useful inside those limits — knowing what applies to a particular activity, in what order, with which deadline, and in which language the letter arrived. For a foreign-owned business in Brussels that is often the whole difficulty.

What matters is saying where the line is before taking the money. A client who is told plainly that their bookkeeping needs a registered accountant has been given something more valuable than a cheaper quote: the knowledge that the cheaper quote they were offered elsewhere may not have been lawful.