Belgian Banking Integration: Why Your Financial Tool Should Talk to Your Bank

Connecting your bank to a financial tool saves you from downloading statements and retyping them. It does not remove the review. This guide covers how the connection works, what a sensible weekly review looks like, and what to check before you connect.

How a bank connection works

Under the EU's second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), a bank must let a licensed third party read your account data with your consent. In practice:

• You pick your bank in the tool and are sent to your bank's own login to approve access.
• The tool receives read access to transactions and balances. It cannot move money on that consent.
• The consent expires after a period set by the rules and your bank, and you are asked to renew it.
• New transactions arrive when the bank makes them available to the connection, which is not always the moment they appear in your banking app.

Which banks are covered, and how often data is refreshed, depends on the tool and on the connection provider it uses. Check both before relying on a connection.

The alternative: upload a statement

Without a live connection, you download a statement from your bank and upload it. It is slower and it is only as current as your last upload, but it gives the tool the same kind of data. For a business with few transactions, a monthly upload can be enough.

What changes once transactions arrive

The value is not the transaction list itself. It is what the tool does with it:

1. Payments meet invoices. An incoming EUR 1,210 can be put next to the open invoice of EUR 1,210 from the same customer.
2. Costs meet receipts. A card payment to a supplier can be put next to the receipt you captured.
3. Gaps become visible. A payment with no document, or an invoice with no payment, shows up while you still remember what it was.

A good tool suggests these links and explains why. It should not decide them for you. The same amount can come from two customers, and a customer can pay two invoices in one transfer or one invoice in two parts.

A weekly review, about as long as it takes

1. Confirm or reject the suggested matches. Start with large or unusual amounts.
2. Look at what is left unmatched. A payment with no document needs a receipt or an explanation.
3. Chase missing documents while the transaction is fresh.
4. Note anything unusual for your accountant, with the document attached, rather than guessing the treatment.

How long this takes depends on your volume. The point is that it happens every week, not in the last days of a VAT quarter.

What to check before you connect

• Coverage: is your bank supported, for business accounts?
• Renewal: how are you told when consent is about to expire, and what happens to the data in between?
• Matching: are suggestions explained, can you reject them, and can you undo a match?
• Access: is the access read-only, and who in your business can see the data?
• Export: can your accountant get the matched records out without repair work?

What Dokus does today

On every plan, a match is a suggestion with its reason, and it is applied only when a person confirms it. Dokus does not confirm matches on its own. Partial payments are recorded as partial.

For the day-to-day view, see know what's paid. For the VAT side of the quarter, see the quarterly VAT guide, and for passing the records on, working with your accountant.