How to organise receipts for tax season in South Africa
Organise receipts by capturing them the day you get them, filing each into the account it belongs to, and letting the period, a month or a VAT cycle, be the unit you hand over. The system that fails is the shoebox sorted once a year; by then the thermal print on the oldest slips has faded and the sorting takes a weekend.
Daily capture beats yearly sorting
The whole game is moving the work from tax season to the moment of purchase, where it costs seconds. A slip scanned the day it was printed is legible, its context is fresh, and categorising it takes one glance. The same slip eight months later is a faded mystery.
Make capture frictionless enough to happen in the parking lot: camera open, edges found, done. Anything slower loses to the cubbyhole.
Slipsort keeps every slip legible for as long as SARS can ask.
Scan in about a second, numbers read for you, one pack per month for your accountant.
Get Slipsort free on iPhoneSeparate the money's homes
Business and personal in one pile is the second classic failure. Keep an account per entity from the start: the business, the personal cards, the rental property. Every question SARS or an accountant asks is scoped to one of them, and mixed records mean re-sorting under deadline.
In Slipsort, accounts are first-class: each slip files into one, and packs are built per account per period, so the business's March never contains the family's groceries.
Let the period be the deliverable
Accountants and returns work in periods. If your records already live as months, tax season is selecting a range and exporting. A Slipsort pack is one PDF per account per period with totals and VAT summed on the cover and every slip image behind it, plus a CSV for the accountant's software on the paid plan.
Provisional taxpayers get the same benefit twice a year: the six months are already assembled, and the estimate stops being a guess.
Quick answers
- Should I keep the paper after scanning?
- You can, in a cool dark envelope, but the scan is the record SARS will actually be able to read in year five. Do not depend on the paper.
- What about invoices that arrive by email?
- On the Sorted plan, every account gets a private email-in address; forward the invoice and it files like a scan. PDF statements and photos work the same way.