Register my Close Corporation for Tax

The CC that I have established is of course a taxable entity, and so I had to register it with the South African Revenue Service (SARS). There were 2 options open to me:

1. Register the Close Corporation for income tax.
2. Register for Turnover Tax

Turnover tax is a really innovative system to simplify returns for SMBs who are filing multiple returns a year especially if you are also VAT registered. My new business will have no employees and will not be registered for VAT, so normal tax registration will do me fine and not make my life any more complicated.

I had to complete for form IT/IB 77C (IT 77C) and fax it through to SARS with my CIPRO registration and a copy of my ID.

The final step of the tax thing is that I now need to register as a provisional taxpayer, as I am a member of a CC, sheesh all these forms to fill out with little blocks!

SwiftReg was really Swift

I am pretty impressed, 7 working days after filling in a form online for registering a new Close Corporation, I am in posession of my CC registration documents from CIPRO. The only critisizm I have is that their site does not look professional, and their email communication got junkmailed by Google's mail filters.

Now of course I have no point of comparison as I am not about to go and register another CC any time soon, but it is enough to say that I am satisfied with the results.

So the guys i used were:

• SwiftReg

Register a Close Corporation (CC)

Why Register a CC?

When my wife and I bought our house my father's sage advice was to put it in one of our names, not both; we did not listen. Having my business activities in a CC would protect my personal assets from liabilities incurred by my business.

If you are willing to read a bit the following site might help you: www.ccguide.co.za

If you want to go direct to Companies and Intellectual Rights Office (CIPRO) for the CC Registration Procedure

If registering your CC yourself seems too arduous, like I did, try one of the many companies that offer shelf and new CCs. They all seem to have really poor sites that do not inspire any confidence, I looked at a couple which could be legitimate but their sites look dodgy:

• Helewix
• QuickCC
• SACloseCorporations

But in the end I went for a bunch that Nedbank uses called SwiftReg, over the next couple of weeks we will see how swift they really are.