Free app for Business Central
Type a Dutch post code and a house number on a customer, vendor or contact, and AdresDirect 365 fills in street, city and province from the BAG, the official address register of the Dutch Kadaster. Free and without a key: the app works right after installing.
You type
The app fills in
Retyping an address is where the mistakes happen: a misspelled street, a city that does not belong to the post code, a province left empty. Business Central fills in only the city for a post code, and only when that post code is already in the Post Codes table. AdresDirect 365 fetches the address from the source: the Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG) of the Kadaster, the Dutch register that holds every address in the Netherlands. It adds one field, House No., right after Post Code; everything else in Business Central works as you are used to.
One new field, one setup page, and otherwise the standard fields of Business Central. The screens below come from a Business Central sandbox with the English client.
Type a post code and a house number, and the app fills in Address (street and house number), City and County with the province, and writes the post code as 1234 AB. With only a post code you get City and County, but not the street: one post code can span two streets.
The House No. field sits right after Post Code on customers, vendors, contacts, ship-to addresses, vendor order addresses, locations and the company information.
12, 12a, 12 A, 12-2 or 12B bis: whatever follows the number is compared with house letter and addition together, as the BAG knows them. If nothing matches exactly, for example 14 where only 14A and 14B exist, the user picks from a list.
The BAG has no provinces. The app derives the province from the first four digits of the post code, using a table of 4,086 areas built from GeoNames data.
Every post code found goes into the standard Post Codes table of Business Central. When someone types a known post code after that, the city comes from there, without a new request.
An unknown address, a service that does not answer or a refused key: the fields stay as they were, and a notification says why. The user can always carry on.
By default the addresses come from the PDOK Locatieserver, the Kadaster's open service: no key, no account, and the app works right away. Want new addresses on the day they are registered, or a key of your own with the Kadaster? Then choose the BAG API Individuele Bevragingen, with a free API key in your organisation's name. The request always goes straight from your Business Central to PDOK or the Kadaster.
By default the app looks up an address only while a user types on a card. With Look Up for Imports and APIs it also looks up addresses from an import, a configuration package or an API integration. Leave that off for large imports: neither address service is meant for bulk.
On AdresDirect 365 Setup you choose the address service, test the connection and switch the app on or off. If you choose the BAG API, you also paste the key there; it is stored encrypted per company and never shown again.
Install the app from AppSource. The lookup is on right away, with the PDOK Locatieserver; there is no key to request.
Open AdresDirect 365 Setup and choose Test Connection. To use the BAG API, choose it in Address Service, request a free key with Request an API Key and paste it into the API Key field.
Type the post code and the house number on an address card. As soon as you leave the field, Address, City and County are filled in.
When a house number has several addresses and none matches exactly, you pick the right one in the Pick an Address list.
AdresDirect 365 looks up Dutch addresses only. The country on the address must be the one on the setup page (NL by default), or empty in a company that is itself in that country, and the post code must look like 1234 AB. Other addresses you type as always. Both address services are meant for looking up addresses one at a time, not for bulk. With the BAG API there is also a limit of 50,000 requests a day, and the key belongs to your organisation: it may not be shared with other organisations, so Van Oosten Software does not provide one. In a sandbox an administrator first has to let the app make outbound HTTP requests, on the Extension Management page.
The app is free. What else you need is listed below; the manual explains every step.
Addresses of sole traders and private persons can be personal data. They stay in your own Business Central environment and do not pass through Van Oosten Software.
The request goes from your Business Central environment directly to the PDOK Locatieserver, or to the BAG API if you choose it. Each request carries only the post code and, when there is one, the house number.
If you choose the BAG API, the API key is stored encrypted per company in isolated storage. Once saved, the page shows only ********. PDOK needs no key.
Van Oosten Software receives only whether a lookup succeeded, found nothing or failed, with a fixed reason. Never post codes, house numbers, addresses, names or the key.
Users who enter addresses need no extra permission set. The AdresDirect 365 set is only for whoever maintains the setup.
Two open sources. Addresses come fresh from the BAG on every lookup; the province table ships inside the app.
The Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen of the Kadaster, by default through the PDOK Locatieserver and, if you choose, through the BAG API Individuele Bevragingen. The BAG is open data (CC0).
The province per post code area is derived from GeoNames data (geonames.org), under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0).
Nothing. The app is free, so is the PDOK Locatieserver, and whoever chooses the BAG API gets the API key from the Kadaster free of charge. There is no licence key and no trial period.
No. By default the addresses come from the PDOK Locatieserver, which needs no key. Only if you choose the BAG API Individuele Bevragingen do you need a key. Your organisation requests it itself, free of charge, with the form the Request an API Key action opens. The Kadaster issues a key to one organisation, so Van Oosten Software cannot provide one.
Both deliver the addresses of the Kadaster's BAG. The PDOK Locatieserver is the government's open service: no key, ready to use. The BAG API asks the register itself, with your own key: an address registered today appears there first. PDOK updates its data very frequently, but without a fixed interval. You choose per company on AdresDirect 365 Setup, and can switch at any time.
That is not what the address services are for. PDOK calls the Locatieserver a search service and points to downloads for large numbers, and the Kadaster allows the BAG API for looking up one or a few addresses, with at most 50,000 requests a day and 50 a second. That is why the app looks up only while someone types by default, and why Look Up for Imports and APIs is off by default. For large numbers the Kadaster offers BAG Extract and BAG GeoPackage.
No. The BAG holds Dutch addresses only, and the app looks up an address only when its country is the Netherlands (or empty, in a Dutch company) and the post code looks like 1234 AB. Other addresses you type as always.
The fields stay as they were and a notification says why. Saving is never blocked. The app waits at most five seconds for an answer, and does not switch to the other service by itself.
No. The request goes straight from your Business Central environment to PDOK or, with your own key, to the Kadaster. Van Oosten Software receives only technical telemetry, without post codes, house numbers or addresses.
Because one post code can span two streets. A post code alone gives City and County; the street comes once the house number is added.
Yes, when the address is found: Address, City and County then get the values from the BAG. When nothing is found, everything stays as it was.
Yes. The settings, and with the BAG API the key, apply per company. After a new installation the lookup is on in every company with PDOK, also in a company you create later. With the BAG API you set up each company separately.
The manual, the release notes and how to ask for help are on this site, in Dutch and English. They describe the version of the app that is current today.
Setting up, daily use, what the notifications mean, the Post Codes table and the permissions.
What is in each version of the app, newest first.
How to ask for help, and what to send along.
These three are about the app and not about this website, so they are kept separate. The privacy statement and terms for van-oosten.nl itself are at the bottom of every page.
Not sure whether the app fits the way you record addresses in Business Central? Ask, and you will usually have an answer within one working day.