BCE / KBO number: how to consult a Belgian company for free

Every active company in Belgium has a unique enterprise number assigned by the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (BCE), called KBO in Dutch. This number is the key to an official public record. Here is what it contains, where to consult it for free, and how to move from a one-off search to genuine monitoring.

What is the BCE/KBO number?

The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises is the official register of companies and their establishment units in Belgium, run by the FPS Economy. Each entity receives a 10-digit enterprise number (for example 0123.456.789), which serves as a unique identifier for the administration, VAT, the courts and third parties.

This number appears on the company's invoices, website, contracts and official documents. It lets you instantly find the company's full record.

Which data is public?

A company's BCE/KBO record gives access to several official, free pieces of information:

• Name and legal form (SRL, SA, self-employed…).
• Enterprise number and VAT number.
• Registered office address and establishment units.
• Status: active, ceasing, bankrupt, de-registered.
• Activities declared via the NACE codes.
• Start date of activity and capacities (commercial, craft…).

Where to consult a Belgian company for free?

There are two main ways to consult this data:

1. The official public tool

The FPS Economy provides the BCE's "Public Search" service. You search for a company by name or by enterprise number and access its identification record for free.

2. An enriched interface

To go further — search by municipality, by NACE sector, access to directors or export — specialised platforms such as Company Belgium's company search structure the data and make it usable day to day.

From one-off consultation to automated monitoring

Consulting a record is useful to check a partner. But if your job depends on knowing the economic fabric — prospecting, compliance, risk management — you need to be notified, not to go looking for the information.

That is where BCE Monitoring comes in: you define your municipalities and your NACE codes, and every morning you receive by email the previous day's new registrations, with a direct link to each record. Consultation becomes automatic.

In short

The BCE/KBO number is the gateway to the official data of any Belgian company — free to consult. For those who need it every day, the next step is to automate this monitoring rather than repeat it by hand.