Registration with the South African Institute of Taxation as a tax practitioner. It's what lets us deal with SARS directly on a client's behalf: assessments, disputes, returns, all of it.
We started out under a different name and roof. The clients were the same kind we work with today: business owners who'd been handed their financials nine months late, with an invoice nobody had agreed to.
Lockdown made a shoebox of slips impossible, so every client moved onto cloud bookkeeping inside a few weeks. It was meant to be temporary. We never went back.
CIBA, the Chartered Institute for Business Accountants, was still called SAIBA at the time. Either name, it's the second professional registration behind the practice, alongside SAIT.
We registered the business and started trading under the name it carries today. Same people, same way of working, under a name that actually says what we do.
BNI runs on chapters that meet weekly and pass business to each other on trust rather than advertising. Most new clients since have come through people who already know how we work.
We'd been working this way for years without calling it anything. Compliance, Processes, Revenue: the three things a business needs a pulse in. It's been the shape of every engagement since.
Construction, IT services, professional practices, non-profits. Most are owner-led, and most arrived with something already behind. A partner still works every file.
We do management accounts monthly, while there's still time to act on what they show.
Advice sits inside the fee. Nobody should be doing mental arithmetic about whether a phone call is worth it.
Every statutory date sits on a calendar we keep. You'll hear from us in good time, not the week after.
Three things a business needs a pulse in. Let one go and the other two start to slip, which is how a company that looks fine on paper ends up in trouble.
The one that slips without anyone noticing.
SARS returns, CIPC annual returns, beneficial ownership, B-BBEE. Nothing warns you when one of these slides. You find out later, once the penalties have run, or a tender falls through, or the bank won't lend.
How the work actually gets done.
It's not only the finance side that runs on memory instead of a system. Quoting a job, onboarding a hire, handing off a project, filing a contract: each one either has a process or depends on someone remembering it. The finance version is the one we see first, because it's the one that ends up in the numbers.
What the first two exist to protect.
Pricing, margin, cash conversion. Most accountants never raise any of it, because it sits outside the filing work. It's also the part that decides whether you're still trading in five years.
Only a registered tax practitioner can act for you on SARS matters. Everything below can be checked, and you should check it, with us and with anyone else you're considering.
