Bulk mailing for Belgian SMEs: a simple bpost workflow

Pro mailings are still a chore for many SMEs

A wave of customer reminders, an association's annual meeting, discount coupons for top clients: there are still dozens of situations where a Belgian SME sends 20 to 500 paper items at once. And most still do it manually: open Word, mail-merge, print, fold, envelope, queue at the post office.

A bad day is 6 to 8 hours of admin time. Plus envelopes, toner and the risk of forgotten stamps. If you regularly send overdue invoice reminder letters by registered post, you know how quickly the volume strains your back-office.

What counts as a "pro mailing"

A clean professional mailing has just three ingredients:

• a PDF template (the letter, identical for everyone), usually with a letterhead and signature,
• a recipients file (CSV or Excel) holding the variables: name, address, amount, reference, etc.,
• a single handover with the carrier (bpost), with one common proof and per-recipient tracking.

Remove any of those three and you are back to "one letter at a time" — time-expensive and hard to industrialise.

The Bjet24 workflow

The goal is to bring physical handling to zero. Here is the typical flow:

1. You prepare a PDF template with placeholders (e.g. {{name}}, {{amount}}, {{reference}}).
2. You export a CSV from your CRM or accounting tool (customers to remind, subscribers to notify).
3. In Bjet24 you upload both files. The system matches the CSV columns with the PDF placeholders.
4. You preview a few items to check rendering (especially with window envelopes).
5. You pick the mail type: prior, non-prior or registered, per item or for the whole batch.
6. You confirm. Every item is printed, enveloped, dropped at bpost and tracked individually.

You end up with a consolidated report (how many sent, how many rejected for incomplete address, total price) and a per-recipient breakdown. For a full overview of prices per volume, visit the Bjet24 pricing page.

Addresses: don't spend half your time on file quality

A mailing rarely fails at print time. It fails on the address. Across 200 SME-customer letters, you typically have:

• 10 to 20 rows with a missing zip or wrong format,
• 5 to 10 companies that moved without telling your CRM,
• 2 to 3 duplicates.

Bjet24 checks each address on upload: you see the rows to fix before wasting a stamp. For business addresses, we cross-reference the CBE/BCE to catch a recent move. You can also follow our Belgian postal address verification guide for SMEs to clean your file before upload.

That is by far the step that saves the most real time compared with a Word merge.

What does it cost vs DIY?

On pure per-item postage price, an outsourced mailing is generally equivalent or slightly cheaper than counter mail (negotiated rates, shared margin on envelopes and paper).

The real gain is elsewhere: for 200 items, where a day of admin help costs 200–250 €, the automated mailing takes under an hour on your side. Over a recurring monthly mailing, the annual saving is several times the marginal cost.

Three use cases that change the game

• Accounting firms sending VAT statements or expert notes to 50 clients at once.
• Landlords sending annual charge statements in batch, with registered mail for late tenants.
• Associations notifying members about an AGM or a membership-fee call.

In all three, the problem is not the stamp — it is the half-day of back-office mobilisation.

Automate further with the API

SMEs with recurring mailings (monthly reminders, due-date notices) can go one step further by integrating their business software directly. Our Bjet24 API integration guide for developers explains how to trigger a batch send from any system without using the web interface. The full technical reference is available in the API documentation.

Summary

A clean pro mailing = one PDF, one CSV and one handover. The rest — merging, address checking, printing, tracking — can be offloaded. For a Belgian SME sending even 50 items a month, automating that flow immediately frees several hours and kills the most expensive address mistakes.