When should a South African business get an accountant?

The honest answer to 'when should I get an accountant?' is not a birthday or a turnover figure written on a wall. It's a set of moments where your admin suddenly gets more complicated and the cost of getting it wrong jumps. If you can recognise these moments, you can bring someone in just before the pain, instead of after it. Here are the five that matter most in South Africa.

Trigger 1: You register a Pty Ltd

The day you incorporate a company, your obligations change shape. A sole proprietor's income is just part of their personal tax return. A company is a separate legal person with its own filing life: it must keep proper accounting records, file an annual company income tax return (ITR14), and — the one people forget — submit a CIPC annual return within 30 business days of each anniversary of incorporation. That CIPC return isn't tax; it's a confirmation the company is still active, and missing it repeatedly can get your company deregistered.

There's also a real tax decision to make early. Companies pay income tax at 27%, but a qualifying Small Business Corporation is taxed on a sliding scale of 0%, 7%, 21% and 27% — which can save you a lot in the early years. Getting that right from day one is far easier than fixing it later. (These are the current SARS rates; SARS adjusts them annually.)

Trigger 2: You hire your first employee (payroll begins)

Taking on staff is the moment DIY admin usually breaks. The day you put someone on a formal payroll, you step into a monthly cycle that doesn't forgive lateness.

• PAYE: you deduct employees' tax and pay it over to SARS, declared on an EMP201, due by the 7th of each month.
• UIF: unemployment insurance contributions of 2% in total (1% from you, 1% from the employee), applied on remuneration up to the monthly earnings ceiling of R17,712.
• SDL: the skills development levy of 1% of your payroll, which kicks in once your total annual payroll is expected to exceed R500,000.
• You'll also need to register as an employer with SARS, and reconcile everything twice a year in the EMP501 submissions.

None of this is optional, all of it is deadline-driven, and getting the numbers wrong lands on your employees as well as you. This is the trigger where most owners stop trying to be heroes and get help — because payroll mistakes are stressful and public in a way that a late slip in a drawer never is. (Thresholds like the UIF ceiling are set by government and reviewed periodically.)

Trigger 3: You cross — or approach — the R1 million turnover-tax line

South Africa has a simplified regime called turnover tax, aimed at micro-businesses with turnover of R1 million or less a year. It replaces income tax, VAT and a few others with a single tax based on your turnover rather than your profit, and it's elective — you opt in. For a very small, simple business it can genuinely cut down the admin.

But two things make this a trigger point. First, deciding whether turnover tax actually beats being taxed normally (especially as a Small Business Corporation) depends on your margins — a high-turnover, low-profit business and a low-turnover, high-profit business get very different answers. Second, as you approach R1 million you're about to be pushed out of the regime, and you need a plan for the transition. Both are exactly the sort of situation-specific call worth getting right rather than guessing — run your numbers past us before you commit either way.

Trigger 4: You hit the VAT threshold

VAT in South Africa is 15%. You are legally obliged to register once your taxable turnover exceeds R2.3 million in any rolling 12-month period (this compulsory threshold applies from 1 April 2026). You may also register voluntarily once your turnover passes R120,000, which sometimes makes sense if your customers are themselves VAT-registered businesses and you want to claim input VAT back.

Compulsory registration is the hard trigger. The R2.3 million test is on a rolling 12-month basis, not your financial year, so you have to watch it continuously — it's easy to sail past it without noticing and end up registering late, which SARS does not take kindly to. Once registered, you're filing VAT201 returns every period, keeping valid tax invoices, and reconciling input and output VAT. It's grinding, unforgiving work with real penalties for slip-ups, and it's the point where a lot of businesses decide the monthly fee is cheaper than the monthly stress.

Trigger 5: The first SARS letter you don't fully understand

This is the softest trigger and often the most important. The moment SARS sends you something — a verification request, an audit notice, an assessment you disagree with, a penalty, a query on your provisional tax — and you feel that little drop in your stomach, that's the signal. SARS correspondence has deadlines, and a wrong or late response can turn a small query into a real problem.

You don't have to face that alone, and you don't have to reply in a panic. Getting someone who reads these letters for a living to look at it — before you respond — is often the difference between a five-minute non-event and a drawn-out mess. If a letter has landed and you're not sure what it's really asking, that's a good moment to forward it to us and get a plain-English read on it.

The pattern behind all five

Notice what these triggers have in common: each one adds a new deadline, a new penalty, or a new decision with money attached. You register a company and gain CIPC and ITR14 deadlines. You hire staff and gain the monthly EMP201 with PAYE, UIF and SDL. You cross turnover-tax and VAT lines and gain a whole compliance cycle. You get a SARS letter and gain a clock. The right time to get an accountant is just before one of these lands — not after it's gone wrong. If you can see one of them coming, that's your cue.