· 6 min read
CODA files: how to automate bank reconciliation
The Belgian bank statement format explained simply, and a method to match payments without spending your evenings on statements.
What is a CODA file?
CODA (coded statement of account) is the standard format for electronic bank statements in Belgium, defined by Febelfin, the Belgian financial sector federation. Every day the account moves, the bank produces a text file with the opening balance, each transaction and the new balance.
The file is built for machines: 128-character lines, each with a record type. Your accounting software reads it directly, so statements no longer have to be copied by hand.
- Record 0: header (bank, date, account holder).
- Record 1: opening balance.
- Records 2 and 3: transactions and details (amount, counterparty, communication).
- Record 8: new balance. Record 9: end of file and control totals.
How to receive your CODA files
Belgian banks supply CODA files on request, usually through a mandate signed by the account holder. The easiest route is a distribution service that collects files from all your banks and delivers them daily to your accounting software or your accountant.
Once the feed is live, check that it covers every account: current account, savings, foreign-currency accounts and business credit cards, which are often forgotten.
Structured communication: the key to automatic matching
In Belgium an invoice can carry a structured communication in the form +++123/4567/89012+++. The last two digits are a modulo 97 check, which lets the software detect typing errors.
When the customer pays with that communication, the CODA file passes it on unchanged and the software finds the invoice without hesitation. It is the most effective way to raise your automatic matching rate.
The payments that cause trouble
Even with CODA, some transactions still need a human:
- Grouped payments covering several invoices, or partial payments.
- Free-text or missing communication, counterparty name different from the customer.
- Bank fees, card terminals and platforms (Stripe, PayPal, Mollie) that pay out net amounts.
- Refunds, credit notes and customer prepayments.
A reconciliation routine that holds
Reconciliation is best done weekly: amounts are still fresh, questions to customers stay simple, and the open-items list is reliable enough to chase late payments.
The golden rule: an unidentified transaction never stays in a suspense account for more than a month. After that it becomes very costly to trace, especially at year-end closing.
Outsourcing reconciliation
Processing CODA files is a regular, precise and easy-to-describe task, which makes it a good fit for outsourcing. Our bank reconciliation and CODA service processes your statements, matches payments and only flags the cases that need a decision, inside your own software.