What it is for
A structured communication is a reference a Belgian bank treats as a field of its own, not as free text. It looks like this:
+++123/4567/89012+++
The point of it fits in one sentence: it identifies one thing and only one. If every subscription in your club carries its own, an incoming transfer says by itself what it belongs to. Nobody has to recognise a name on a bank statement, or guess what “DUPONT M” is paying for when there are two Duponts in the club.
That is the difference between accounts that reconcile themselves and accounts read line by line on a Sunday evening.
How it is built
Twelve digits, and not all of them are free. The first ten are your number: a counter, an invoice reference, whatever you like. The last two are a check key, calculated from the other ten.
The key is the remainder of dividing those first ten digits by 97. That is what lets a bank reject a mistyped reference without knowing anything about your club: one digit off, and the key no longer checks out.
One oddity, and it catches out everyone who codes this themselves: when the remainder is 0, the key is written 97, never 00. A reference ending in 00 is silently rejected by Belgian banks, with no message and no explanation.
Why your bank writes it three ways
Depending on the bank and the export, the same twelve digits show up in three forms: between three plus signs, between three asterisks, or simply grouped with nothing around them.
- +++123/4567/89012+++
- ***123/4567/89012***
- 123/4567/89012
All three identify the same subscription. A tool comparing printed forms rather than the digits themselves fails the moment the club changes bank — and that is a hard failure to understand, because everything looks right on screen.
Do you have to calculate it yourself?
No. A structured communication is not typed in, any more than an IBAN is composed from memory. It is assigned by the tool that issues the subscription, and it is unique to that member and that season.
If you are still copying references into a spreadsheet, that is the first thing that breaks: a reference reused from one season to the next drops one member's payment onto another's subscription.
The QR code does the rest
A structured communication is worth nothing if the member mistypes it. That is why the message sent with the subscription also carries a QR code in the European EPC format, the one Belgian banking apps recognise.
The member scans it and their app opens a transfer already filled in: club account, exact amount, structured communication. All that is left is to confirm. Nothing typed, so nothing mistyped, so the reference comes back intact.
And when a member forgets it?
It happens, and it is not serious. The transfer arrives with no reference, carrying an account number and a name.
Two things catch it. If that account is known to only one member, the transfer is attributed to them automatically. And if that member has an open subscription, their payment surfaces in the reconciliation queue, where all that remains is to confirm it is indeed the subscription.
A shared account — a couple, a parent paying for two children — never triggers an automatic attribution. It ranks a suggestion, it does not decide: that is what keeps one person's subscription from landing on another's record.
The loop, end to end
Three moments, and nobody types anything at any of them.
Frequently asked questions
- Do we need an agreement with the bank?
- No. A structured communication is not a banking service: it is a reference format every Belgian bank recognises. There is nothing to request and nothing to activate.
- Do we have to give access to our account?
- No. You download the bank statement as CSV from your online banking and import it. No access to your accounts is requested, and no banking connection is established.
- Can the same reference be reused each year?
- It should not be. A reference designates one specific subscription, not a person. Reused, it attaches this season's payment to last year's — and both end up wrong.
- What about payments that are not subscriptions?
- A transfer for the tournament or the bar has no structured communication, and needs none. It comes in as income to file under a category, without ever touching subscriptions.