Compliance & Governance

Open Accounting → Books Health. It shows each control with the ledger figure, the figure from the documents and the difference.

Books Health checks that every journal balances and the trial balance balances. It also checks that receivables (1100) equal open invoices less unapplied credit notes, payables (2100) equal open bills less unapplied supplier credit notes, customer advances (2250) equal unallocated receipts, fixed assets agree with the asset register, and opening balance suspense (9999) is nil. Where possible it lists the documents behind a difference. The bank balance is shown next to the last imported statement balance for information.

Go to Finance → Financial Reports → VAT201 Return and enter the start and end date of the VAT period. The header shows the company name, VAT number and VAT category.

The return is laid out in the SARS field structure (guide GEN-ELEC-04-G01, Revision 11). Every VAT amount comes from the VAT accounts: 2200 for output tax and 1200 for input tax. The source document of each journal decides the field. For example, invoices go to Fields 1 and 4, capital goods to 1A and 4A, supplier bills to 14 to 15A, bad debt relief to 17, and credit notes issued to 18.

VAT posted by a manual journal is placed in Field 12 (output) or Field 18 (input) and listed by journal number so you can check it. Field 20 is compared with the net movement on 2200 and 1200 for the period; if they differ, a warning appears in this list.

Fields 5 to 11 (accommodation) and 16 (change in use) are not generated and show nil. Enter them on eFiling if they apply. When Field 2A, 14A or 15A has a value, the notes remind you that a customs code is needed on eFiling.

Capture the figures on SARS eFiling and submit. Then close and lock the months in Accounting → Periods, so nothing more can post into the period you declared.

Open Finance → Financial Reports → EMP201 Declaration and choose the month. It totals PAYE, SDL, UIF (employee and employer) and ETI from issued payslips for that month, shows ETI brought forward, used and carried forward, and the total payable to SARS. The due date shown moves to the last business day before the 7th when the 7th falls on a weekend; public holidays are not taken into account.

Open Finance → Financial Reports → EMP501 & IRP5 (e@syFile) and pick the reconciliation period. The screen lists items to fix before exporting and tells you whether the certificates agree with the monthly EMP201 totals. Download a TEST file first, then the LIVE file, and import it into e@syFile. The file covers monthly-paid employees with a South African ID number; anything outside that scope is reported as an error rather than written to the file.

Go to Settings → Audit Trail. Only administrators can see it. Every create, change and delete action is listed with the user, date and time, IP address, the endpoint used and the data sent.

Filter by resource (table), action, user email and date range to answer questions such as "who changed this supplier last week?"

Go to Settings → Access. The system roles are Administrator, Manager, Staff and Viewer. You can also create custom roles. The role permission matrix shows which named permissions each role has, such as finance view, create and edit, approvals and report export. Assign roles to users under User Role Assignments. Users themselves are managed under Settings → Users.

Adding or changing GL accounts, posting manual journals, closing, locking and reopening periods, closing the financial year and posting opening balances all need an administrator. Books Health, the financial reports and group reports need the report export permission.

Issued invoices and posted bills cannot be edited or deleted; they are cancelled by a reversing entry. A supplier payment run must be approved by a user other than its creator before the bank file can be exported. Each company has its own books, and a login only sees the companies its administrator has granted.