A business pays tax on what it earns, and the way that works depends on how the business is structured. Getting the registrations right early is straightforward; discovering years later that one was missing is not.

If you trade in your own name

There is nothing separate to register. Your business income is part of your personal income, you declare it in your own annual return, and you will almost certainly be a provisional taxpayer — meaning you pay in instalments during the year rather than once at the end.

What you do need is records. Income and expenses, separated from personal spending, kept from day one. The single most common cause of an unnecessarily large tax bill for a small trader is unclaimed expenses that were never recorded.

If you have registered a company

The company is a taxpayer in its own right. It gets its own tax reference number, files its own return, and pays tax on its own profit — quite separately from whatever you pay personally on what you take out of it.

That separation catches people out in both directions. Money in the company account is not yours until it is properly paid to you, and paying yourself is itself a decision with tax consequences depending on whether it is salary, a dividend, or repayment of a loan you made to the company. Worth one conversation with an accountant at the start rather than a correction later.

The other registrations

  • Employer, the moment you have staff — for employees' tax, and separately for UIF.
  • VAT, once turnover reaches the threshold. This is compulsory at that point, not optional, and it is covered separately.
  • Customs, if you import or export.

None of these happen automatically because you registered a company. They are separate applications and nobody prompts you.

What you can claim

Broadly, expenses incurred in producing income. For a small business that usually means stock, materials, rent, business travel, professional fees, software, insurance, and the business portion of things like a vehicle or a home office where the use is genuine and can be substantiated.

The word doing the work is substantiated. Keep invoices, and keep them in a way you can find. An expense you cannot evidence is an expense you cannot claim, whatever you actually spent.

Get ahead of the money

Tax on profit is not a surprise; it is arithmetic you can do in advance. Set aside a share of profit as you go, in a separate account you do not treat as available.

Businesses that fail to do this are the ones that meet a tax bill they cannot pay from money they have already spent — and an unpaid tax debt affects everything else, including the compliance status you need to win work.

General guidance, not tax advice. Rates, thresholds and rules change annually; confirm the current position with SARS or a registered tax practitioner.