Monitoring company changes: tracking and alerts
How to monitor changes in your business partners? Set up automatic alerts for status, address or activity changes.
In brief
Belgian company data in the BCE/KBO changes daily: statuses, addresses, legal forms, names. To detect these changes without exhausting your API quota, webhooks from Company Belgium are far preferable to regular polling. A webhook covers 1,000 companies where polling would consume 96,000 requests per day.
Why monitor your partners?
Company data evolves constantly:
- Status change: an active company may be struck off or put into liquidation
- Relocation: change of registered office address
- Activity change: addition or removal of NACE codes
- Legal form change: transformation from SRL to SA
Solution 1: Regular polling
Query the API regularly to detect changes. Compare current data with last known data.
Solution 2: Webhooks (recommended)
Configure webhooks to receive automatic notifications when status, address, or name changes occur.
Solution 3: Monitoring dashboard
Create an internal dashboard to visualize the status of your partners.
Recommended verification frequency
| Partner type | Frequency |
|---|---|
| Major clients | Daily |
| Critical suppliers | Daily |
| Regular partners | Weekly |
| Prospects | Before each interaction |
Notifications
Integrate alerts into your existing tools: email, Slack/Teams, CRM.
Further reading
To go further in monitoring Belgian companies, see the BCE/KBO API integration guide to get started quickly, and the rate limits and caching architecture to keep latency under 50 ms at scale. If your monitoring process also includes a KYC check, read the automated KYC verification guide. For Python developers, the FastAPI tutorial shows how to implement a webhook receiver endpoint.
Conclusion
Monitoring changes in your business partners is essential for risk management. Our API allows you to automate this monitoring.
Frequently asked questions
How do you automatically detect that a Belgian company has changed status in the BCE/KBO?
The most efficient method is to configure a Company Belgium webhook that sends a company.status_changed event as soon as a change is recorded in the BCE/KBO. Alternatively, you can regularly query the GET /api/companies/{number} endpoint and compare the status field with your last known value. The webhook is preferable because it eliminates unnecessary polling and reduces your API consumption by a factor of 4,800.
How often are company data updated in the Belgian BCE/KBO?
The BCE/KBO is updated daily via Open Data imports from the Belgian SPF Economie. Full and Update files are published every day on the Belgian government FTP server. Company Belgium synchronises this data daily, meaning changes to status, address and name are generally reflected in the API within 24 hours of official registration.
What types of changes can be monitored for a Belgian company via the API?
Via the Company Belgium API you can monitor: status changes (active, struck off, in liquidation, in bankruptcy), registered office address changes, name or trade name changes, addition or removal of NACE codes (activity sector), and legal form changes. Webhooks support 9 distinct event types to cover all these cases.
Are webhooks or polling better for monitoring Belgian companies?
Webhooks are recommended in almost all cases. With polling every 15 minutes across 1,000 companies, you consume roughly 96,000 requests per day, requiring a Pro plan. With webhooks, you only receive actual events, averaging about 20 notifications per day for the same coverage. The consumption gap is 4,800 times, and the free plan is often sufficient for small portfolios.
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