Outsourced accounting, run remotely for your business

Outsourced accounting, run remotely, for a fixed monthly fee

Outsourced accounting means your finance function sits with us rather than with an employee in your office. We do the bookkeeping, reconcile the accounts, produce the monthly management reports, prepare the annual financial statements, and file what SARS and CIPC require. You keep the decisions. We keep the records straight and tell you what they say.

Everything runs on cloud accounting software, which is why the word remote matters here. Your bank feeds come in automatically, your invoices and bills are captured digitally, and you can log in and look at the same live numbers we are working on. There is no monthly ritual of dropping a box of slips at an office. PayStream is a remote practice registered in Sandton. A good number of our clients have never met us in person, and it has never once mattered to the quality of the work.

The difference between a bookkeeper, an accountant and what we do

This distinction trips up a lot of business owners, so it is worth being blunt about it.

• A bookkeeper records what happened. Invoices, bills, bank transactions, reconciliations. Necessary, but backward looking.
• An accountant takes those records and turns them into statements, returns and tax positions. Also necessary, and usually only seen once a year.
• An outsourced finance function does both continuously, and then tells you what it means while you can still do something about it. That is the gap most small businesses fall into: the books get done, the tax gets filed, and nobody ever says the words "your gross margin dropped four points in the last quarter".

PayStream operates as the third one. The compliance work is the baseline, not the product.

What we do every month

1. Process the books. Bank statements, card transactions, supplier invoices, customer invoices, petty cash, loan accounts and inter company entries.
2. Reconcile everything. Bank, credit cards, debtors, creditors, VAT control, PAYE control and loan accounts. A reconciliation that has not been done is a number you cannot trust.
3. Review. A senior person looks at the result before it goes to you, which is where misallocations, duplicated supplier invoices and missing income get caught.
4. Report. Profit and loss against the prior month and the prior year, balance sheet, cash position, debtor age analysis and a short note on anything that moved.
5. File. VAT201 where you are registered, provisional tax when the period falls, and the CIPC annual return in your anniversary month.

Cloud accounting software we work on

We work in Xero, Sage Business Cloud, QuickBooks Online and Zoho Books. If you already have a system we will work in yours. If you do not, or if the current one is in a state, we will set it up properly: chart of accounts built for your business rather than the generic default, bank feeds connected, opening balances agreed to the last set of signed financials, and VAT rates configured correctly. A clean setup is the single biggest determinant of how useful your numbers are for the next five years.

Where the existing file is a mess, and it often is after a few years of unsupervised DIY, we do a cleanup first: unreconciled items cleared, suspense accounts emptied, duplicated contacts merged and the VAT control account agreed back to what was actually submitted to SARS. We tell you upfront what that will take.

Annual financial statements and year end

At year end we prepare annual financial statements compliant with IFRS for SMEs, together with the supporting schedules for fixed assets, provisions and loan accounts. These are what your bank asks for when you apply for finance, what SARS expects to see behind an ITR14, and what a buyer or investor will read first if you ever sell. Because the monthly work is already done and reconciled, year end is a review rather than a three month scramble to rebuild a year of records.

Where an independent review or an audit is required by the Companies Act, we prepare the file to the standard the reviewer needs and manage the process with them, which keeps their fee down and your involvement minimal.