Monthly accounting · 4 min read
What monthly accounting includes for a South African small business
By The Small Business Accountant. Reviewed by Rudolf Etsebeth. Updated 28 September 2026. General information for South African small businesses, not advice on your return.
Why waiting until year end is expensive
A file that is only touched in February describes a business nobody can steer. VAT periods get missed. Provisional tax is copied from a year that looked nothing like this one. A buyer, a bank or SARS then asks for months you can no longer remember.
The remedy is dull on purpose. Same week each month. Same checklist. A person whose job is to finish it.
The minimum a monthly close should cover
If a proposal is vaguer than this list, ask what is being left out. These are the pieces that stop the annual return becoming an archaeology project.
- Every business bank and card account reconciled to the statement, with timing differences listed
- Sales invoices and supplier bills captured, including cash sales
- Customer receipts and supplier payments matched
- VAT coded only where a valid tax invoice exists
- Payroll journals that agree to the payslips and the EMP201
- Drawings, shareholder loans and private spending identified, not buried in “miscellaneous”
- Debtors and creditors aged, with the ones that are wrong marked
- A one-page note: cash, tax already spoken for, gross margin, and the overdue list
What you should be able to answer after the meeting
How much cash is actually free, after VAT and PAYE that already belong to SARS? Who owes you more than 60 days, and is it still collectable? What did the family take out, as salary or as drawings? Did the month make a gross profit that resembles the prices on the shelf?
If the pack cannot answer those four, it is a data dump. Send it back.
Bookkeeper, accountant, or both
A bookkeeper keeps the capture moving. An accountant owns the close, the tax entries and the reading. In a small firm such as TSBA the same practice often does both, which avoids the gap where each party thought the other had reconciled the VAT control.
You still need an owner in the business who can say what a payment was. No system removes that. It can make the question take thirty seconds instead of a Saturday.
A practical way to begin
Pick a start date and close that month properly, even if earlier months are still messy. Then decide, with the accountant, whether the backlog is needed for an open VAT period or an unfiled return. Not every old month deserves the same hours.
The service we run around this list is monthly accounting. The tool we usually use is Sage Business Cloud Accounting. The tier that includes the tax returns as well is Compliance month.
Sources
Still asking
After the habit exists, the owner’s part is answering queries and reading the note. If you are still coding every transaction yourself, the split is wrong or the file is not set up. The first two months take longer because the queries are old.
TSBA quotes after a look at the volume: bank accounts, invoices, VAT, payroll and how far behind the file is. A published price would describe an average client we do not have. The packages page shows what each tier contains.