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.

All eight common ones: FNB, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Absa, Capitec, Investec, TymeBank, Discovery Bank. PDFs only — the ones your client downloads themselves from the banking app. No bank logins, no scraping, no open-banking pipes.

Processed in-request and dropped. The parser reads the PDF buffer, extracts lines + balances + the cycle window, and the buffer is discarded as the response returns.

Only the derived rows persist. Sensitive fields (tax numbers, ID numbers, amounts, descriptions, counterparty) are encrypted column-by-column with app-layer AES-256-GCM. A database dump on its own is meaningless without the master key.

Every row is editable in one tap on the Confirm tab. The first override 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.

Your overrides save as deterministic rules at the firm or client level — applied on the very next row, no retraining loop required. The upstream model itself doesn't learn from your data: OpenAI's commercial API excludes prompts from training, and we only send what's needed to call the bucket (description + rand value, no names or ID numbers).

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

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.

Postgres on Neon in the Frankfurt EU region while we wait for their SA zone to open. Application servers on Vercel (fra1, Frankfurt — same continent, no transatlantic hop). Sensitive columns are AES-256-GCM at rest; TLS 1.3 in transit. The security page breaks down the stack end-to-end.

We don't file. TaxUp produces the income statement; the firm files the return using its own SAIT-registered 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.

Three roles: firm-admin (manages the firm, billing, team), firm-practitioner (reviews flagged work in the practitioner queue), and firm-filer (day-to-day categorisation + confirm).

Every action lands in a sealed firm-wide audit log. Per-client assignment (so a specific filer always picks up a specific client) is on the roadmap.

Per-firm monthly subscription, banded by active client count. 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.

Your practitioner signs off anything the validation layer flags, then a click-to-copy assist walks the return into SARS eFiling field by field. You submit under your firm's own SAIT-registered practitioner number — TaxUp 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).

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, confirm, and the new client and seat limits apply immediately — upgrading mid-crunch unlocks the extra seats on the spot.

Billing stays manual invoicing until autopay ships, so there's no card step — your next invoice simply reflects the new plan. Downgrades work the same way whenever your usage fits the smaller band.