Editorial
Insights, playbooks and updates on business valuations, M&A and the SME transfer market.
Owners overestimate their business by 20-40% on average. Buyers underestimate by a similar margin. Both are wrong. What data can and can't fix at the negotiation table.
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A third of Belgian and Dutch SME owners are over 55. Half have no successor lined up. The next fifteen years bring a transfer wave that needs real infrastructure now.
A defensible valuation puts seller, buyer, advisor and bank on the same fact base. Only then can a platform match an SME with the right strategic or financial buyer.
The most attractive mistake infrastructure builders make is to assume they speak directly to the end user. For an SME owner in transition, that is rarely the path. The accountant and M&A advisor are the real distribution layer.
Belgium’s capital gains tax makes one date strategic: 31 December 2025. For entrepreneurs who held shares before 2026, a defensible reference value is the difference between a documented file and a formula-driven tax discussion.
On June 4, 2026, Work Smarter brings accountants, bookkeepers and business advisors together at Planet Group Arena in Ghent. Upswitch will demonstrate live how automated SME valuation works directly from Silverfin, Octopus, Yuki and Exact.
Yuki is an automation-first cloud accounting platform for accountants and clients across the Benelux. How the direct connection with Upswitch translates Yuki's rich transaction data into normalised EBITDA: without manual exports, without Excel back-and-forth.
Expert/M (Wolters Kluwer Adsolut Suite) runs on-premise at thousands of Belgian accounting firms. How the Upswitch connection normalises EBITDA from the Expert/M saldibalans XML: no live API, same MAR classification and defensibility checks as our cloud connectors.
Exact Online is a widely used cloud accounting package for accountants and businesses in Belgium and the Netherlands. How the direct REST API connection with Upswitch computes normalised EBITDA from your Exact files: without manual extraction.
A defensible valuation is not the one with the best methodology. It is the one you can explain, reproduce and defend to someone on the other side of the table.
Give two competent accountants the same SME P&L and you'll likely get normalised EBITDA figures 15 to 25% apart. A defensible framework for the six categories where most divergence happens.
Trust in, trust out. Liquidity follows truth, not the other way around. The five building blocks of a working SME succession market.
Every working day in Europe, around 1,800 SME owners put their company up for sale. Two thirds find no buyer, or one only at a price that doesn't reflect what was built. It's a crisis. Just not one that makes the news.
