Brussels Digitalisation Grant: Getting Up to €10,000 Back on a Consultancy Mission

If your company has an operating establishment in the Brussels-Capital Region, the Region can reimburse 25% to 70% of what you pay an external consultant for a digitalisation mission — a website, an online shop, a CRM or ERP rollout, an automation project. The ceiling is €10,000 per beneficiary per calendar year. The scheme is called Prime Digitalisation in French and Premie digitalisering in Dutch, and it is run by Brussels Economy and Employment.

This page is the practical version. Every figure below was checked against the Region's own pages on 11 October 2026 — the French prime-digitalisation page and the Dutch premie-digitalisering page. Subsidy rules change; before you build a budget around this, check the date above.

What the scheme actually pays for

It pays for a consultancy mission delivered by an external provider. It does not pay for things you keep paying for every month. In practice that line matters more than anything else in your quote:

• Eligible: analysis, strategy, design, development, configuration, migration, training — the work of the mission itself.
• Not eligible: hosting, domain names, software subscriptions and licences, advertising budget, hardware, and anything recurring.

If one quote mixes both, you invite questions you do not need. The clean approach is a quote for the mission only, with subscriptions and media spend quoted separately, outside the file.

The money, without the marketing

The single most common misunderstanding: €10,000 is not the project budget. It is the maximum the Region will pay out to one beneficiary in one calendar year. What you get is a percentage of your eligible spend:

• 25% — the base rate everyone starts from.
• +25% if you are a starter (under four years old; +20% for a medium-sized company).
• +30% for recognised environmental exemplarity, +30% for social exemplarity (+20% each for medium-sized companies).
• 70% — the maximum combined rate, and €10,000 per beneficiary per calendar year regardless.
• €500 — the minimum intervention per mission. Very small jobs do not qualify.
• Two subsidised missions per calendar year, maximum.

So a €20,000 mission at the base rate returns €5,000, not €10,000. Reaching the full €10,000 means spending enough that the percentage gets you there:

Two levers do most of the work. Starter status is the only bonus you do not have to earn — it depends on your registration date alone, and it takes a small company from 25% to 50%. The calendar year is the other: the envelope resets on 1 January and two missions are allowed per year, so a programme split across a year end runs against €20,000 rather than €10,000. The two-missions limit is also how you reach the ceiling when a single €40,000 mission will not fit inside the six-month cap.

One honest gap: the Region's pages say "per calendar year" without stating which date anchors the year — the filing, the decision, or the payment. If your plan depends on splitting across 1 January, ask the administration before you file rather than after.

One caution about the exemplarity bonuses: they are the only route above the starter rate, but they have to be recognised, and that recognition takes time. Waiting for it can cost you more in delay than the extra percentage is worth. Doing the first mission at 25% now and preparing exemplarity for the next one is often the better trade.

Who can apply — and who cannot be the applicant

The applicant is the company that pays for the mission and receives the subsidy: an SME with an operating establishment in the Brussels-Capital Region, registered, active, in an eligible sector, with its annual accounts filed and its de minimis aid over the last three years still under €300,000.

The point that sinks files: the applicant and the consultant cannot be the same person or entity. The consultant must be independent of the beneficiary. A self-employed person cannot apply for a subsidy to pay themselves — that file is refused. If you are reading this as a freelancer hoping to subsidise your own work, the scheme does not do that.

Two things worth checking in your own registration before anything else:

• Your filed accounts. Accounts not filed is a standard reason for refusal, and it has nothing to do with your project.
• Your activity codes. Some sectors are excluded. Check the full list of NACE codes attached to your VAT registration, not just the one you think of as your business. The 2008→2025 NACE conversion left plenty of companies carrying codes they never chose — we have seen a cosmetics company carrying a retail-fuel code it had no connection to, and retail fuel sits on the excluded list. Your main activity being eligible is not the whole answer; a stray code is worth cleaning up through your business counter.

The five dates that decide the file

• Before the start. The application goes in through the regional portal — MonBEE in French, MijnBEW in Dutch — at the latest the day before the mission starts. Work already begun is not eligible. There is no retroactive file, and this is the one rule with no way around it.
• Decision. The administration notifies its decision within four months of receiving a complete application.
• Start. The mission must begin no later than three months after the notification of approval.
• Duration. The mission runs over a maximum of six months.
• Justification. You have twelve months from the notification to submit the supporting documents.

Read the duration limit against your own plan before you write the quote. A year-long redesign does not fit a scheme that caps missions at six months. Either the scope comes down, or it becomes two missions with a clean break between them.

You do not have to wait for the decision

This is where files lose weeks for no reason. Filing is what makes the spend eligible — not the approval. Once the application is in, the mission can start the next day, months before the decision arrives. The rule that the mission must begin within three months of notification is a deadline, not a waiting instruction.

Be clear about what you are carrying, though: if you start before the decision and the file is refused, you have a project and no subsidy. That is a commercial decision, not a formality. What it should never be is an accident — starting work before the file is submitted makes the application ineligible outright.

Who is allowed to invoice the mission

The Region sets three conditions on the provider. The consultant must:

• have consultancy services as its main activity;
• have been carrying out that consultancy activity for at least two years;
• be independent of your company.

The two-year condition is the one people discover too late — usually at the justification stage, when it is far too expensive to fix. Check it before you sign anything.

It is also worth knowing that two years of activity does not have to be read off a Belgian registration. Where a provider has a longer track record abroad, an extract from the relevant commercial register, showing the registration date and the activity codes, with a sworn translation attached, is the document that answers the question. A recent Belgian registration on its own does not prove seniority — the register extract does.

Filing it: the order that works

1. Get the file signed before you touch the portal. The quote or mission agreement has to exist, and be signed by both sides, before the submission date.
2. Register on the portal with itsme or another CSAM method. If the manager has never set this up, allow for it — first-time identity setup has a habit of eating a day or two, and nothing else can proceed without it.
3. Attach yourself to the company in the portal, as administrator for the legal entity. The proof is an extract from the Belgian company register (KBO/BCE) showing who is authorised to act for the company — free to pull by company number.
4. Open a new application and choose the digitalisation scheme.
5. Work through the form section by section: company data, the eligibility declarations (sector, filed accounts, de minimis), the description of the mission and the provider, the amounts, the exemplarity bonuses if you are claiming them, the attachments, and finally the declaration of honour. Sections can be saved and continued later — you do not have to finish in one sitting.
6. Attach the documents. In the straightforward case there are three: the signed quote or mission agreement, the consultant's CV with references, and the company's bank details. Add the provider's register extract where seniority needs proving.
7. Sign and submit. The signature is personal: it is the authorised manager who signs with itsme, not an assistant and not an agency.
8. Keep the acknowledgement of receipt. It is your proof of the filing date — the date the whole eligibility of your spend hangs on.

When someone files on your behalf

You can have a third party prepare and submit the application, but then the file needs a mandate — and here is the thing nobody tells you: the Region publishes no official mandate template. There is no form to download. What is required is the content, not a format. A mandate has to:

• give the third party the right to submit and follow the application;
• be granted by someone legally empowered to bind the company;
• be a specific power of attorney for that application — not a general one — and be accompanied by the beneficiary's bank details.

Even with a valid mandate, expect the signing step to need the manager in person. Delegating the paperwork is realistic; delegating the identity is not.

Approval is not payment

An approval letter is a commitment, not a transfer. The money arrives after the mission is delivered and justified. That means, through the portal:

• copies of the consultant's invoices;
• proof of payment from the company's own account — a bank confirmation, not a statement of intent (if something was paid by card, the card statement plus the company-account payment for it);
• a summary table tying each budget line to an invoice number and amounts excluding and including VAT;
• an end-of-mission report, completed by the consultant.

Only once that package is accepted does the claim document come back for payment. Plan your cash flow accordingly: between the approval letter and the money in the account there are realistically several months, and the gap can straddle a year end. The subsidy is a reimbursement of money you have already paid out — it never funds the project up front.

Two more obligations that outlive the project: keep the mission's documents for the retention period the decision sets out, and do not claim another subsidy for the same costs. Breaches are recovered, with interest.

The mistakes that cost files

• Starting the work first and applying afterwards. The file is simply ineligible — and this is not recoverable.
• Applying as the consultant. Applicant and provider cannot be the same party.
• Reading €10,000 as the project budget instead of the annual payout ceiling.
• Putting a year-long programme into a six-month scheme.
• A quote that mixes consultancy with subscriptions and media budget.
• Ignoring the consultant's two-year condition until the justification stage.
• Trusting your main activity code without checking the full list for an excluded one left behind by the NACE conversion.
• Waiting for exemplarity recognition when the delay costs more than the bonus.
• Forgetting the second mission. Two per calendar year are allowed, so a large programme can be split on purpose.
• Changing the delivery approach after approval without a paper trail. The approved budget was approved against a described scope; if the justification tells a different story, expect questions at control.

Where we come in

We build the digital side — websites, online shops, integrations, automation — and we prepare the subsidy file alongside the project instead of pretending the two are unrelated. Concretely, that means:

• checking your eligibility before anyone spends time on paperwork: establishment, sector codes, filed accounts, de minimis room, and whether your plan fits six months;
• writing the mission so the scope is subsidisable, with the recurring costs kept out of it;
• preparing the file in the language of the file — the quote or mission agreement, the CV and references, the provider's register extract with a sworn translation where seniority has to be proven;
• walking the manager through the portal, section by section, up to the signature — which stays yours;
• building the justification pack as the work happens: invoices, timesheets, proof of payment, the summary table and the end-of-mission report, so the final step is assembly rather than archaeology.

We can also act as the provider for the mission itself. The two-year condition is the question every serious file asks, and in our case it is answered by a register extract showing the activity since 2020, with a sworn translation attached — not by our Belgian registration date. A file built that way was approved in September 2026 on first submission, with no requests for clarification. We say that as a fact about one file, not as a promise: every application is assessed on its own, and the decision is the Region's, never ours.

What we need from you is small: the company register extract, confirmation that the accounts are filed, the bank details, a decision on scope, and the authorised manager available for the signature.

Questions we get asked

Can we apply once the site is already live? No. Filing has to happen before the mission starts; there is no retroactive application.

Do we have to wait for the decision before starting? No — you can start the day after filing. You carry the risk of a refusal if you do.

Does the Region pay us or the consultant? You. The subsidy is paid to the beneficiary, after you have paid the consultant's invoices from the company account.

Can we split a bigger programme? Yes, within the two-missions-per-year limit, and the annual envelope resets on 1 January.

What if our quote is bigger than the ceiling? Nothing breaks. You receive the capped amount; the rest is a normal project cost.

Is a lawyer needed for the file? No. It is an administrative file, not litigation.

Before you build a budget around this

Treat the subsidy as a reimbursement you have a good chance of receiving, not as part of your funding. Decide the project on its own merits, file correctly, start on the right side of the date, and keep the paperwork as you go.

If you want us to look at whether your project fits — and what the file would need — write to [email protected] with your company number and a sentence about what you want to build. Figures on this page were verified against the Region's own pages on 11 October 2026; the Region remains the only authority on its own rules.