The hrmano blog

The salary simulator

hrmano team — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR — hrmano is launching a salary simulator designed exclusively for directors of Belgian companies. Accessible without an account, it lets you adjust every compensation lever and see the impact in real time thanks to our dynamic payroll engine. Create a free account to save up to 4 simulations and convert them into actual compensation.

The problem with existing simulators

When a Belgian company director wants to estimate the impact of a change in their compensation, they have three options — and none of them is satisfactory.

The spreadsheet. Formulas pile up, a rate gets forgotten, you tweak one cell and three others break. Result: a file no one can vouch for anymore.
The social secretariat. Little responsiveness, answers come with a delay, often as a flat-rate calculation that doesn't reflect the specifics of your situation. Impossible to quickly test a "what if?".
Online simulators. Designed for employees, they ignore the director's reality and the levers specific to their situation.

We deserved better. So we built it.

A simulator designed for directors

The hrmano simulator is designed exclusively for directors of Belgian companies. It's not a standard gross-to-net calculator with a "self-employed" button tacked on at the last minute. It's a tool that understands your situation from the start — and it's accessible without an account, without signing up.

You arrive, configure your situation in a few minutes, and simulate. The interface guides you step by step: company, current compensation, personal parameters. Each field comes with a clear explanation, and default values are calibrated to the most common cases.

In practice, you can:

Adjust every lever of your compensation: salary, benefits in kind, employer-specific expenses (mileage allowance, home office allowance, garage allowance, entertainment expenses…), PLCI.
See the impact in real time — every change is instantly reflected across net in pocket, company cost, corporate tax, personal income tax and social contributions.
Compare scenarios side by side: "What changes if I go from a net income of €2,000 to €2,500 per month?"

Save your scenarios, take action

The simulator without an account is perfect for exploring. But once you've found interesting scenarios, you'll want to keep them. By creating a free account, you can save up to 4 different simulations.

Each saved simulation represents a complete compensation scenario — and when you're ready, you can convert a simulation into actual compensation directly in hrmano. The path from simulation to execution is direct: simulate, compare, decide, apply — in one single tool.

Powered by the dynamic payroll engine

What makes the simulator so responsive is the dynamic payroll engine built at the heart of hrmano. Unlike traditional engines that process calculations with a delay, sometimes over 24 hours, our engine recalculates your entire situation with every change, in milliseconds.

Director compensation is a system of interconnected variables: changing one parameter affects all the others. Every decision has a hidden cost that only a comprehensive calculation can reveal.

With our engine, you no longer need to guess. You move a slider, everything adjusts. It's the difference between flying blind and flying with instruments.

What you should know

It's not tax advice — but it gives you the numbers you need to optimise. The simulator provides the visibility to make your own decisions, ideally in consultation with your accountant or tax adviser.
It's the first step towards your payslip. The simulator is the starting point for configuring your compensation, which you can then make real through our payslip service.
Always up to date. We continuously track changes in Belgian tax and social legislation, and update our payroll engine accordingly. These updates are directly reflected in the simulator.

Try it

The simulator is accessible without an account, without signing up, without commitment. Open it, configure your situation in a few minutes, and see what your compensation could look like. And if you like what you see, create a free account to save your scenarios and take action.

Alex & Salva

Try the simulator now — no sign-up required. Create a free account when you're ready to save your simulations.

The launch

hrmano team — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR — We're Salvatore and Alexandre, two Belgian engineers and company directors. We're launching hrmano, an application that lets Belgian directors visualise, simulate and optimise their compensation in real time — with an assistant built for them, not for administration.

The turning point

Before hrmano, we had built a first compensation management product aimed at accountants. A comprehensive, precise tool, capable of handling all the complexity of Belgian director pay. The feedback from the field was clear: we had built a Formula 1 for people who only needed a go-kart.

And it makes sense. The accountant plays an essential role — corporate tax, balance sheets, compliance — and that's where their expertise and time are naturally focused. The fine-tuning of a director's compensation, with all its levers (allowances, benefits in kind, supplementary pension…), is a subject in its own right that goes beyond their day-to-day scope. On the social secretariat side, the available tools are payroll engines designed for employees, awkwardly adapted to fit the director's case. The result: untapped possibilities and directors missing out on a significant part of what they're entitled to.

That's when it clicked. The problem wasn't the tool — it was who it was aimed at. The director themselves is best placed to manage their own compensation, alongside their accountant's work. They just need a product built for that.

So we chose to start from a blank page. Rebuild the calculation engine differently, from scratch, with one conviction: it had to be designed from the outset to integrate with artificial intelligence. The goal was no longer to deliver yet another dashboard, but to build an assistant capable of guiding the director through every compensation decision — in real time, in their own words, at their own pace.

This is the ambition from which hrmano was born.

Who are we?

We are Salvatore and Alexandre, two Belgian engineers, directors of our respective companies, and passionate about building products that solve real problems.

Over the years, we've built software solutions, supported companies through their transformation, and learned one essential thing: a good product doesn't come from an abstract market opportunity — it comes from a problem you've lived. And as directors ourselves, we know the complexity of compensation from the inside.

Our dual role — engineers AND directors — gives us a particular advantage: we understand both the technical complexity of a subject like director compensation in Belgium, and the daily reality of those who have to make these decisions.

Why Belgian director compensation deserves a real product

Belgium has one of the most complex director compensation systems in Europe. This isn't an opinion — it's an administrative fact:

Multiple levers available: salary, dividends, director's fees, benefits in kind, employer-specific expenses, pension plans, group insurance…
Multi-layered taxation: corporate tax, personal income tax, INASTI social contributions, withholding tax on dividends…
Thresholds to respect: to benefit from the reduced corporate tax rate (the famous minimum salary of €45,000).
Constant trade-offs: between immediate compensation, wealth building, and pension preparation.

The result? Most directors make important decisions based on rough rules, inherited habits, or an annual review that often comes too late to adjust course.

We believe it's time for a tool that allows you to anticipate, not just observe.

What we're building

We're launching an application that enables any Belgian company director to:

Clearly visualise their total compensation, across all levers.
Simulate optimisation scenarios in real time (and no longer just once a year).
Make informed decisions on the salary / dividends / pension / benefits mix.
Anticipate the real tax impact of each trade-off, on both the company AND personal side.
Stay in control of their compensation — instead of just accepting it.

Our conviction: a director who understands their compensation makes better decisions, for themselves and for their company.

Why us, and why now

Let's be honest: we're not accountants. We don't claim to replace a tax adviser or chartered accountant — on the contrary, our tool is designed to be a complement that makes those conversations richer and more strategic.

What we bring is what's missing today: a product designed from the director's perspective, not from administration's. A clear interface. Instant simulations. A real product experience, as you'd expect in 2026 for any other management topic.

We're building it because we need it ourselves. That's probably the best reason to launch a product.

What's next

In the coming weeks, we'll be sharing here:

Our concrete analyses on key trade-offs (salary vs dividends, EIP vs PLCI, company car vs mileage allowance…).
Behind the scenes of building the product.
Feedback from other directors testing the tool with us.

If you're a director of a Belgian company and this resonates with you, we'd love to hear from you. Whether you want to test the application early, share your own struggles on the topic, or simply chat — the door is open.

See you soon,

Alex & Salva

Want to be among the first to test the application? [Join the waiting list] — we're opening access gradually.