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Under the hood

Our methodology

What data we use, how each score is computed, and — just as important — what we can NOT know. No black box: every score traces back to a public source and a rule.

Sources

Everything Checked shows comes from official Belgian public sources. We fetch them regularly, normalise them and link them to a single company spine, so one search shows everything published about a Belgian company:

  • KBO / BCE — The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises: the company registry. Provides identity: enterprise number, name, legal form, address, NACE activity code and incorporation date.
  • Belgisch Staatsblad / Moniteur belge — The official legal gazette. The source of our risk signals: bankruptcies, judicial reorganisations, interim administrators and director bans.
  • NBB / BNB — The National Bank of Belgium publishes filed annual accounts. We use the balance-sheet and income figures behind our financial ratios, health barometer and snowflake.

We add nothing that doesn't follow from these sources. Our scores are a transparent interpretation layer — an honest summary of public facts, not secret data.

Data freshness

We refresh our data regularly from the official sources. New legal publications — a bankruptcy, a reorganisation, an administrator — usually appear on the dossier within a day. Company identity (name, address, NACE) follows the registry's cadence. Annual accounts are published once per financial year, with the usual lag between year-end and filing; our financial scores are therefore always based on the latest filed account and are, by nature, historical.

Risk score

The risk score (0–100) is rule-based, NOT a trained ML model. We deliberately call it ‘interim': once our dataset is large enough to validate a statistical model soundly we'll replace it — but until then a transparent point tally is, we think, more honest than a black box. The score counts only hard legal insolvency signals from the gazette. Per signal type we assign points:

  • +50 — an open, active bankruptcy procedure
  • +20 — historical bankruptcy publication(s) (when no open bankruptcy is active)
  • +10 — per judicial reorganisation (WER Book XX), capped together at 30
  • +5 — per pre-bankruptcy signal, e.g. an interim administrator, capped together at 25
  • +3 — per administrative flag (strikeout, non-compliance)
  • = total, capped at 100

The score falls into five bands: 0–9 low · 10–24 moderate · 25–49 elevated · 50–69 high · 70+ severe. Every point points to a concrete publication you can verify on the dossier. Important: a score of 0 only means ‘no current insolvency signals' — it says nothing about profitability or solvency. For that, see the health barometer below.

Health barometer & credit limit

The health barometer (0–100, higher is healthier) reads the latest filed annual accounts and turns them into a point score. We start neutral at 50 and move up or down based on classic financial ratios we compute ourselves from the NBB figures:

  • Liquidity — current ratio and quick ratio: can the company cover its short-term debts?
  • Leverage / solvency — debt-to-equity ratio; negative equity weighs heavily.
  • Profitability — return on equity (ROE) and EBITDA margin.
  • Interest coverage — does operating cash flow cover interest charges?
  • Trend — are net profit and equity growing or shrinking year-on-year?

On top of that, one hard correction applies: a current insolvency signal from the gazette — an open bankruptcy, an ongoing reorganisation — pushes the score sharply down, even if the last balance sheet still looks healthy. The score falls into five bands: 0–24 weak · 25–44 fair · 45–59 reasonable · 60–74 good · 75+ excellent. Every point movement shows a readable reason, so you can see why the score is what it is.

The indicative credit limit

Alongside the barometer we show an indicative trade-credit ceiling. It's a conservative blend of equity and turnover, scaled by the health score: roughly a small percentage of equity, capped by the same fraction of annual turnover, and rounded to a clean amount. On negative equity, an open bankruptcy or weak health, the limit drops to zero. This is expressly NOT credit advice and not a guarantee: it's a starting point for your own assessment, based on public figures.

The snowflake — five axes

The snowflake is a five-axis fingerprint, each 0–100, showing at a glance where a company is strong or thin. It's cut for Belgian private companies (no share price, so no value or dividend axis). Each axis comes from the same NBB figures and gazette signals that feed the other scores:

  • Health — the health barometer above (liquidity, leverage, coverage, with insolvency correction).
  • Profitability — ROE, EBITDA margin and net margin.
  • Solvency — equity ratio, current ratio and debt-to-equity.
  • Growth — revenue growth (CAGR) over the available years, plus profit and equity trend.
  • Stability — track record: free of insolvency signals, company age, depth of filing history and absence of administrative flags.

The snowflake is a reading aid to grasp a company's shape quickly, not one aggregated number. A high axis does not offset a low one elsewhere.

Sector failure rate

On the sector pages we show a failure rate. The definition is deliberately simple and verifiable: it's the number of active companies in that NACE activity that had a bankruptcy opening in the gazette over the last 60 months (five years), divided by the total number of active companies in that same activity, expressed as a percentage.

It's a coarse sector barometer, not a per-company prediction. It works best for activities with enough companies to be meaningful; for very narrow NACE codes with few players, a single bankruptcy can swing the rate sharply.

What we do NOT know

  • The present between two filings — Our financial scores rest on the latest filed annual accounts and are therefore historical. A company may have improved or deteriorated markedly since the last year-end without that yet being public anywhere.
  • Operational reality — Customer complaints, late-paid suppliers, HR issues, quality-of-work — none of this is in public data. Ask for references.
  • Hidden ties — Directorship and mandate ties are shown insofar as they appear in public acts. Not every tie is published, and names can vary across sources.

Wrong data, question or correction?

Checked only shows data from public official sources, summarised indicatively. Something wrong, or want a record about you reviewed or corrected? Email us with the enterprise number and what's wrong. We check whether it's a source error (at KBO, the gazette or NBB) — fixed at the source — or a processing error on our side, which we correct. For GDPR requests (access, rectification) use the same address: hallo@checked.be