The first year of a business is when compliance either gets set up properly or quietly falls apart. Nobody sends you a friendly welcome pack listing what you owe SARS and CIPC — you're just expected to know, and the penalties for not knowing land all the same. Here's the checklist, roughly in the order things actually happen, so nothing slips through the cracks while you're busy trying to trade.
1. Register the company at CIPC
If you're going the Pty Ltd route, it starts with registering the company at the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC). That gives you a separate legal person with limited liability — and a registration anniversary date you'll have to remember every single year (see step 7). You'll also need to attend to your beneficial-ownership filing, which records the real humans who ultimately own or control the company; CIPC now requires it, and it's not optional.
2. Register for income tax
Every company must be registered for income tax with SARS. A company incorporated through CIPC is generally registered for income tax automatically as part of the process — but you need to confirm it's active and that you can actually access it on eFiling. Don't assume it happened by itself; the number of owners who discover months later that their tax profile was never properly set up is not small.
3. Register for VAT — only if you need to (or want to)
VAT is not automatic, and registering when you don't need to just buys you admin. You must register once your taxable supplies exceed R2.3 million in any rolling 12-month period (the compulsory threshold from 1 April 2026, up from R1m — SARS adjusts these annually), and you have 21 business days to register once you cross it. You may register voluntarily from R120,000 if it suits your business — for example, if your customers are themselves VAT-registered and you want to claim input VAT. Registering too early creates admin you didn't need; ignoring the threshold once you cross it is a compliance problem.
The R2.3m test is a rolling 12 months, not your accounting year. A strong few months can tip you over mid-year — so track the trailing-12-month figure monthly, rather than getting a nasty surprise (and a backdated liability) at year-end.
How the rolling threshold sneaks up on you
You average about R180,000 of taxable supplies a month — roughly R2.16m a year, comfortably under the line. Then you land two big projects and bill R400,000 in each of two months. Add up the trailing 12 months at that point and you've crossed R2.3m, even though your 'normal' run-rate is under it. From that moment you have 21 business days to register, and you must start charging VAT once your registration is effective. Miss it and SARS can pursue the VAT you should have collected — money you can't easily claw back from customers after the fact.
4. Register as an employer if you take anyone on
The moment you employ someone — and that can include you drawing a salary from your own company — you step into the payroll world:
- PAYE — register as an employer and file an EMP201 monthly, with payment due by the 7th. There's also an EMP501 reconciliation to submit at the interim and annual points.
- UIF — 2% total (1% you, 1% the employee) on earnings up to R17,712 a month for the 2026 tax year.
- SDL — 1% of your total payroll, but only if your annual payroll bill exceeds R500,000.
5. Get onto the provisional tax calendar
Every company is automatically a provisional taxpayer. That means paying your income tax in advance, in instalments, on an IRP6: a first payment at the end of August, a second at the end of February, and an optional third top-up at the end of September to mop up any shortfall before interest runs. Under-estimate the February payment badly and there's a 20% under-estimation penalty on the shortfall, so this isn't a figure to pluck from the air. The catch that stings first-year owners is cashflow: nobody warns you that a lump of tax falls due in your first August, so the money has to be set aside as you earn it, not found in a panic at the deadline. Put a percentage of every good month aside from day one and provisional tax stops being a shock.
6. Don't confuse your two tax returns
As a company you'll file an ITR14 — your company income tax return — after year-end. That's separate from your provisional IRP6 payments during the year, and separate again from your personal ITR12 if you draw a salary. Knowing which return does what, and when each is due, is half the battle in year one. They aren't interchangeable and SARS treats a missed one as a missed one.
7. File your CIPC annual return
This is the one first-year owners forget, because it has nothing to do with SARS or tax. Every company must file an annual return with CIPC within 30 business days of its incorporation anniversary. It is not your tax return — it's a separate filing, with a small fee, that simply confirms the company is still active and keeps it on the register. Skip it and CIPC can move to deregister your company — and a deregistered company loses its legal existence, which can freeze bank accounts, void contracts and, in the worst cases, strip away the very limited-liability protection you set the company up for. Reinstating a deregistered company is a slow, painful process compared with the few minutes the return takes. Diarise your anniversary date the day you incorporate, and set the reminder a month early.
8. Keep the paperwork from day one
Set up proper records immediately — invoices, receipts, bank statements — and keep them for five years. It's far easier to start clean than to reconstruct a year from memory and a bank feed later. Cloud accounting makes this close to automatic and means the numbers are ready when SARS or your bank asks for them.
Don't carry this in your head
That's seven or eight separate obligations, on different calendars, with different penalties — all while you're trying to actually run the business. This is exactly the load we take off new owners: we get the registrations right, put every deadline on a calendar, and make sure year one is clean rather than a clean-up job. Book a discovery call and start on the front foot.