Nicolas Quarre

Nicolas Quarré's public voice centers almost entirely on one conviction: the self-employed are systematically underserved by tax and social-contribution systems, and the data proves it. His most substantial post is not a product announcement but a piece of original research, and he frames it as such: "Welcome to one of the most meaningFUL analyses I did in my professional life" . The finding he leads with is blunt and designed to unsettle assumptions, that "more than 1 in 2 self-employed in Belgium pay MORE than 20.5% in social contributions" against an expectation that contributions should be capped near that rate . He pushes the point further into absurdity with the statistic that "29% of the independents earning less €10k contribute MORE THAN 50% of their profit in social contributions, even before taxes," which he punctuates with a single word: "Insane" . This is characteristic of how Quarré argues in public: he leans on large, proprietary datasets, in this case "14,671 self-employed years from our own anonymised data at Accountable," to back up claims that would otherwise sound like anecdote or advocacy .

That same instinct, using data to expose the hidden costs of self-employment, extends to how he talks about the lived experience of being independent, not just the fiscal mechanics. Citing an Acerta study, he highlights that "61% of self-employed people work THROUGH illness," and unpacks the psychological toll behind it: "46% feel permanently 'on', and for self-employed with employees that rises to 70%," while "48% say work regularly bleeds into their private life, especially among younger independents" . Importantly, he resists turning this into a simple victim narrative. He explicitly acknowledges agency and tradeoff: "self-employed people choose this path: the freedom & autonomy that comes with trade-offs they knowingly accept," and he credits Belgium's existing safety net rather than dismissing it, "Belgium has good healthcare and income protection insurance for the self-employed" . His critique is more precise than "the system is broken", it's that the payout structures don't match the real economics of stepping away from work, so "that calculation rarely comes out in favour of rest" . This is a recurring pattern in his thinking: sympathy for the self-employed condition paired with a refusal to romanticize it or oversimplify the policy failure.

On the product and platform side, Quarré consistently frames Accountable's value in terms of removing friction for both self-employed users and the accountants who serve them. He is proud of scale, noting growth from under 500 accounting firms to "2,157 fiduciaries & accountants using us with their clients," and he's transparent about having personally cited the old, smaller number for a long time before the growth caught up: "this is what I was telling everyone asking me how many accountants we using us" . But he doesn't stop at the vanity metric. He digs into usage data to find the real problem: "77% of them still exported flat files (PDF, UBL, etc.)," and diagnoses this not as user preference but as an awareness gap, "not because they like to or want to, but because nobody showed them there was a better way" . He then walks through the exact painful workflow he wants to eliminate, "Download file from Accountable → import into your software → reconcile manually → repeat for every client", before pointing to Accountable Connect as the fix . This mirrors his approach elsewhere: identify the workflow, quantify the pain, then show the mechanism that removes it. The same evidence-first habit shows up when he amplifies a partner's results, calling out "70% tijdbesparing" as "INSANE" and framing it as the benchmark efficiency gain accountants using Accountable should expect .

Partnerships and distribution are another steady thread. He treats the Proximus Group relationship as validation more than a routine business deal, describing the invitation to present alongside Proximus's b2b team as "an honour to be part of the strategy of such an incredible brand & company in Belgium" . He's specific about the terms offered through that partnership, "6 months for free for Proximus customers signing up on Accountable and 35% discount on our best plan for users already with us", and leaves the door open with characteristic understatement, "there is no limit to building a successful partnership" . He returns to the Proximus relationship again separately, calling it one of the partnerships "you can only dream about when you start building a company" , suggesting this deal carries outsized symbolic weight for him relative to its immediate commercial terms.

Across interviews describing Accountable itself, Quarré is consistent in positioning the product as a replacement for the traditional accountant-dependency loop rather than a replacement for accountants entirely. He describes it as software that lets self-employed workers "create invoices and automatically calculating their tax obligations, social contributions, and VAT in real time rather than waiting for an accountant," while still backing this with "a support team of around thirty people in Belgium" and citing scale, "75,000 users in Belgium" ¹². In discussing the multi-market expansion into Germany, he traces the problem back to personal experience, explaining that the pain point "emerged from his own experience being self-employed across multiple countries," and that validation came before building, through interviewing self-employed professionals ahead of the MVP ¹³. This origin story recurs as his explanation for why the product resonates: it wasn't built from abstract market sizing but from direct, lived friction.

Taken together, the throughline in Quarré's public statements is a rejection of vague grievance in favor of quantified argument. Whether the subject is social contribution rates, illness and burnout among the self-employed, or accountant workflow inefficiency, his default move is to produce a specific number, react to it with genuine surprise or frustration, "Insane," "INSANE🔥", "🤯", and then use that number to justify a concrete next step, whether that's a policy critique, a product feature, or a partnership expansion . The practical takeaway for anyone reading his output is that he treats Accountable's internal data as a public good for advocacy as much as a business asset, and he consistently uses that data to argue that self-employment in Belgium (and beyond) carries structural costs that are underappreciated, undermeasured, and, in his view, correctable through both better tooling and better policy awareness .