Ledger notes.

EMP201 is due by the seventh of the month following the payroll it covers. Not the seventh working day, not the Friday nearest the seventh. If the seventh falls on a weekend or a public holiday it moves earlier, not later — which catches out more employers than any other rule in the calendar.

The penalty for paying late is ten percent of the amount due, and it applies from day one. There is no grace period and no sliding scale. An employer with a R180,000 monthly PAYE, UIF and SDL liability who files three days late has spent R18,000 on nothing at all.

What makes this avoidable is that the number is knowable a week in advance. The payroll is run before month end; the liability is fixed the moment the last payslip is finalised. Any practice that hands you the figure on the sixth is doing it wrong — you should have it before the month has closed.

This is the single most common misunderstanding we meet, and it costs small companies more than any tax dispute. A CIPC annual return and a SARS income tax return are unrelated filings, to different bodies, on different dates, for different reasons.

The CIPC annual return confirms the company still exists and pays a small fee based on turnover. It is due within thirty business days of the anniversary of incorporation, every single year, whether or not the company traded, earned anything, or has been dormant since 2021.

Miss enough of them and CIPC starts deregistration. A deregistered company cannot contract, cannot bank, and cannot tender. Restoration is possible but slow and considerably more expensive than the returns would have been — and in the meantime the business is, legally speaking, not there.

Diarise it against the incorporation date, not the financial year end. They are almost never the same date, and assuming they are is how the lapse begins.

A refund selected for verification is not an accusation. It is routine, and the businesses that clear it in days rather than months are simply the ones whose supporting documents already existed before SARS asked.

Most delays come down to input tax claimed on a document that is not a valid tax invoice. Section 20(4) is specific: the words “tax invoice”, the supplier name, address and VAT registration number, your details, an invoice number and date, a description of the goods or services, and the VAT either shown separately or stated as included. A supplier quote, a proforma, a statement or a card slip is none of these things.

The second cause is a VAT control account that does not reconcile to the returns filed. If the ledger says one number and the VAT201 history says another, verification becomes an investigation, and the burden of explaining the difference is entirely yours.

Both are close-process problems, not refund problems. Validate the invoice when it is captured and reconcile the control account every month, and verification becomes an email with an attachment rather than a quarter of your life.

Provisional tax feels like a separate levy to most first-time company owners. It is not. It is the same income tax, paid in advance, in two instalments — one at the end of August and one at the end of February — with the annual return simply settling the difference.

The trouble is the estimate. Underestimate the second one badly and an under-estimation penalty follows, calculated on the shortfall. The safe harbour rules give some protection where taxable income is under R1 million and the estimate is at least the basic amount, but leaning on last year plus a little is exactly how a good trading year turns into a penalty.

This is a bookkeeping problem long before it is a tax problem. If the ledger is closed monthly, the August estimate is arithmetic on six months of real figures. If the books are eight months behind in August — which is when we usually meet people — the estimate is a guess, and the guess is what gets penalised.

Annual budgets are for governance. Thirteen-week cash forecasts are for survival, and they are the single most useful artefact we build for a growing business.

Thirteen weeks is long enough to see a shortfall while it is still solvable and short enough that every line is a real, nameable receipt or payment rather than a smoothed assumption. In a South African context it also spans a full VAT cycle and at least one provisional payment, which is precisely where cash plans tend to come apart.

It only works if it is maintained weekly against actuals. A forecast built once and admired is not a forecast; it is a document.

Every accounting package ships with a suspense account, and every neglected ledger has one bloated beyond recognition. It is where uncertainty goes to be forgotten.

The alternative costs almost nothing: a single running questions list, consolidated and sent once per close, with each item carrying the date, amount, counterparty and what we need to resolve it.

Clients answer a list. They do not answer a drip of individual messages across three weeks — and that difference is the whole reason suspense accounts grow. It matters more here than elsewhere, because anything sitting in suspense at period end is either understating or overstating a VAT position that has already been declared.