SME Compliance: Elephant In The Room

South Africa’s SMEs create jobs for a semi-skilled and unskilled labor force who would be otherwise unemployed. One of the factors that cause poor performance and eventually the death of SMEs revolve around taxation costs. Compliance with TAX is the most costly and challenging; and the time spent on compliance by owners is perceived to be the most excessive cost incurred in ensuring tax compliance. Being compliant would lead to the incurrence of additional nonproduction time and expenses such as employing personnel to undertake the tax activities, time and effort needed to understand the procedures, completion of tax returns, a compilation of receipts, and recording this information.

Compliance is one of the best ways to manage risks that are inherent to startups because non-compliance to regulatory requirements will result in paying fines, restrictions on operations, and license revocations. Therefore, it is important that startups observe compliance guidelines to ensure smooth operations.

The Startup Huddle programme provides a platform for entrepreneurs to discover solutions to the challenges they face through purposeful engagement with a broad array of voices from the local community. In this huddle, we will aim to give startups a quick guide to compliance for startups discuss how this can be done in a cost and resource-effective way.