[fscl]

Context

Belgian freelancers face the same puzzle every year: how do you get money out of the company without handing half of it to the tax office? There are three levers — director's salary, copyright royalties (auteursrechten), and dividends — each with its own rate, social-contribution treatment, thresholds, and waiting periods. Copyright royalties are by far the cheapest channel (~15% flat, no social contributions), but they come with hard caps, a four-year averaging rule that can retroactively collapse the entire regime, and a documentation burden most freelancers never meet.

In practice this optimization happens once a year, in an accountant's spreadsheet — if it happens at all. Existing calculators ignore copyright royalties entirely, and the tools that handle copyright paperwork don't optimize anything. The Belgian rules also changed twice in 2026 alone, which makes a maintained tool structurally better than any spreadsheet.

Approach

fscl is the money-decision layer on top of accounting — deliberately not bookkeeping, invoicing, or VAT. It does two things: it computes the optimal split of company profit across the three channels under all legal constraints (the 30% royalty cap, the ~€77k ceiling, the four-year cliff, the €50k minimum salary that unlocks the reduced 20% corporate rate), and it generates the documentation that makes the copyright channel defensible in an audit: a transfer agreement, a works inventory, and step-by-step guidance for the 281.45 fiche.

The product is strictly a tool, never tax advice — it shows the math and generates the documents, framed as "bring this to your accountant." A free stateless calculator serves as the funnel; the paid tier adds saved year-over-year data, which the four-year cliff makes genuinely necessary rather than a retention gimmick.

Built solo with Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel, with a Neon Postgres database (EU region) storing minimal, encrypted financial data. The calculation engine is isolated from the UI: every number shown anywhere — including marketing surfaces — is derived live from the engine, never hardcoded.

Outcome

A working product: public calculator, optimizer, scenario comparison across years, and a living audit dossier, all on a custom design system built for showing financial precision. The tax model was verified against the 2026 rule changes and is structured so future changes are configuration, not rewrites. Currently in the go-live phase at fscl.be.