The questions firms ask first.

Xero and Sage are full general-ledger systems your clients use day-to-day. TaxUp is upstream of that: drop a year of bank-statement PDFs, get a categorised income statement out.

No chart-of-accounts setup, no per-row mapping work, no ledger to maintain. We're not trying to be your client's bookkeeping system — we're how your firm gets through the bank-statement-crunch at year-end without hiring more juniors.

Dedicated readers for FNB, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Absa and Capitec. Statements from other South African banks, such as Investec, TymeBank and Discovery, are read by a general reader. Upload the PDF statements your client downloads themselves from the banking app. No bank logins, no scraping, no open-banking pipes.

A statement we read successfully isn't stored; we keep the transactions, with amounts, descriptions and counterparties encrypted. The one exception is a file we could not read: it is kept encrypted for 30 days so the failure can be fixed, then deleted. Transactions read during client onboarding are held, encrypted, with the onboarding draft.

When our own readers can't read a statement confidently, the whole PDF is sent to OpenAI to be read, including the account holder's name and account number.

ID numbers and tax numbers are encrypted the same way, column by column with AES-256-GCM. The master key lives in Vercel project secrets, not in the source code. Names, contact details and finalised return snapshots are not encrypted this way.

Supporting documents you upload (IRP5s, certificates, ID documents) are stored as files. They are not encrypted, and removing a document does not yet delete its file.

Every row is editable in one tap on the Confirm tab. Choose to remember an override and it saves a rule for that client: same merchant next month lands in the same bucket without re-asking.

You can also write firm-wide always-on rules ("anything from Eskom is Utilities") that outrank the engine's verdict across every client.

An override you choose to remember saves as a deterministic rule for that client, and firm-wide rules you write apply across every client, with no retraining loop. Neither is used to train a model, and OpenAI's API terms exclude API data from model training.

To categorise the rows that saved rules and the merchant list don't settle, we send OpenAI each transaction's description, amount and date, with the client's business profile. When our own readers can't read a statement confidently, the whole PDF is sent to OpenAI to be read, including the account holder's name and account number. Uploaded tax certificates and SARS documents that can't be read from their text are sent to OpenAI to be read in the same way. OpenAI also drafts a client profile from the account holder's name and a summary of the statement, and answers support chat.

From the Clients tab inside the firm dashboard. Add a client (name + email), upload their first bank statement, and let rules and the AI categorise it.

A year of activity (~800-2,000 transactions) typically lands in a workable state inside ten minutes — the bottleneck is your taps on the hand-back queue, not parsing speed. After the first client, every subsequent one inherits firm-wide rules you've already saved.

The database is Neon Postgres in the EU (currently Frankfurt, eu-central-1), and the app runs on Vercel in Frankfurt (fra1). Files are stored in Vercel Blob. OpenAI processes data through its standard API, which isn't hosted in South Africa, and we haven't configured EU data residency for it. Data does not stay in South Africa. ID numbers, tax numbers, transaction amounts, descriptions and counterparties are encrypted at column level with AES-256-GCM, and traffic is HTTPS only. The security page breaks down the stack end-to-end.

We don't file. TaxUp prepares the income statement and the return; the firm files the return on SARS eFiling under its own practitioner number, the way the firm already does.

We also deliberately stay off VAT (VAT201), payroll (EMP201/501), trust returns (ITR12T), and multi-employee company returns. If your client needs those, TaxUp is the books-side of the workflow only.

Yes. Owners and admins manage the firm, billing and team, and only they can sign off a return. Practitioners, filers and reviewers work on the client books.

You can assign each client to a staff member, and admins can reassign clients in bulk. Changes your staff make (uploads, categorisations, overrides, returns) are recorded in an append-only audit log scoped to your firm, with who made them and when. Viewing records and signing in are not logged.

Per-firm monthly subscription, banded by the number of clients on your roster, archived clients included. Independent at R 3 149/mo (≤10 clients, 3 seats), Studio at R 5 949/mo (≤20, 5 seats), Workshop at R 13 999/mo (≤50, 10 seats), Bench at R 26 249/mo (≤100, unlimited seats). Above 100, it's Enterprise — talk to us. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

No — your firm files, TaxUp prepares. We build the SARS-ready return: ITR12 for individuals and sole props and ITR14 for owner-managed companies, every line traceable back to the categorised transactions, with provisional-tax (IRP6) periods and deadlines tracked alongside.

Pre-submission validation raises hard stops and review flags. Your firm's owner or an admin signs the return off, then a click-to-copy page lays it out field by field for SARS eFiling. You submit under your firm's own practitioner number and record the SARS reference in TaxUp. TaxUp has no connection to SARS and never touches your eFiling login.

Both. Individuals and sole proprietors run the ITR12 path. Owner-managed companies are first-class clients: CIPC registration as identity and the flat-27% ITR14 preview, with provisional-tax (IRP6) periods tracked (companies are provisional taxpayers by law). Small business corporation relief isn't applied yet: company tax is calculated at the standard rate.

Trusts can sit on your roster for the books side, but TaxUp doesn't prepare trust returns — there's no ITR12T return type — and multi-employee company returns and VAT-registered work are out of scope.

Every tier gets a per-client optimisation report: deductions the engine found in that client's categorised year, each with an estimated saving. On Studio and up, the Advisor goes further — forward-looking strategic moves like retirement-annuity headroom, totalled per client and across your whole book.

On Independent the Advisor runs in preview: you see the book-wide savings total and your top recommendation, and upgrading to Studio unlocks the full list. Either way it's a prompt for your practitioner to weigh — the accountant decides what's appropriate; TaxUp just surfaces what the numbers show, never tax advice.

Self-serve from your firm dashboard: pick the band and confirm, and you're redirected to PayFast to pay securely — card details never touch TaxUp.

The new client and seat limits apply as soon as PayFast confirms the payment. Downgrades work the same way whenever your usage fits the smaller band.