Accounting services
Bookkeeping Services South Africa
Keep reliable books without building a full internal finance team. M&J organises the monthly records that tax filings, reporting and decisions depend on.
Bookkeeping is the layer everything else depends on. VAT returns, provisional tax estimates, management decisions and the annual financial statements are all built from it, which means a month of sloppy capturing is not a bookkeeping problem, it is a tax and reporting problem that surfaces later.
We run the monthly cycle: capturing, bank reconciliation, supplier and customer ledgers, and a closed period that does not move afterwards. The output is a set of books someone else can rely on without redoing them.
Who this is for
Built around your operating reality
- Growing SMEs
- Foreign-owned subsidiaries
- Businesses with delayed or inconsistent books
- Companies moving from spreadsheets
What we deliver
A controlled, documented service
- Transaction processing and ledger maintenance
- Bank and control-account reconciliations
- Customer and supplier ledger review
- Month-end close checklist
- VAT-supporting schedules
- Management reporting handoff
Common situations
When businesses hand bookkeeping over
- The bank has not been reconciled in months
- You are making decisions on numbers you do not fully trust
- VAT returns are being estimated because the books are not ready
- Your accountant re-does the bookkeeping at year end, and bills for it
- The person who did the books has left
- The business has outgrown a spreadsheet
What a proper monthly close involves
Capturing transactions is the visible part and the smallest part. The work that makes books reliable is the reconciliation and the close: agreeing the bank, agreeing the control accounts, clearing suspense, and then locking the period so the numbers do not silently change after they have been reported on.
A period that stays open is a period that can be edited, which is why a set of books can show a different profit in March than it did in February for the same month.
- Transaction capturing against source documents
- Bank, credit card and loan account reconciliation
- Debtors and creditors ledgers agreed to control accounts
- VAT control account reconciled to the returns filed
- Suspense and clearing accounts emptied, not carried
- The period closed so reported numbers stay fixed
Bookkeeping is not the same as accounting
Bookkeeping records what happened. Accounting interprets it, accruals, provisions, depreciation, cut-off and the judgements that turn a cash-based picture into a financial position.
Businesses that buy only bookkeeping often find the year-end bill higher than expected, because the accountant is doing the accounting work that was never done monthly. Where that matters, the monthly service should include the accounting layer rather than only the capturing.
The records behind the numbers
SARS can ask for the source documents behind any figure, and an input tax claim without a valid tax invoice is disallowed regardless of whether the expense was genuine. Document retention is therefore part of bookkeeping, not an administrative afterthought.
We set up the filing so documents are attached to transactions as they are captured, which is the only version of this that survives contact with a busy month.
Clear steps and responsibilities
Agree responsibilities and cut-off dates
Clean opening information
Run and review the monthly close
Report exceptions and actions
Learn from other people’s mistakes
Where bookkeeping goes wrong
Reconciling only at year end
Errors compound. A misposted transaction found eleven months later has usually been repeated, and unpicking it costs more than catching it in the month.
Suspense accounts used as a filing cabinet
Anything parked in suspense is an unanswered question. Carried forward, it becomes a year-end problem nobody remembers the context for.
Periods left open
If prior months can still be edited, no report is stable and no comparison is meaningful.
Capturing without documents
A transaction with no supporting document is a transaction you cannot defend under query, however obviously legitimate it looked at the time.
Getting started
What we need to run your books
- Bank statements for all accounts, in a machine-readable format
- Sales invoices or the invoicing system export
- Supplier invoices and expense receipts
- Payroll reports if payroll is run elsewhere
- Loan, asset finance and lease agreements
- The last set of financial statements and the current trial balance
Frequently asked questions
What to know before you begin
If your situation is not covered here, ask, the answer usually turns on facts a page cannot know.
Is bookkeeping the same as accounting? +
Bookkeeping maintains transaction records; accounting adds interpretation, reporting and technical treatment. Many engagements need both.
Can you work in our software? +
Yes, subject to access, controls and platform suitability.
Do you submit tax returns too? +
Tax filings can be separately scoped and connected to the bookkeeping cycle.
How quickly can you take over from our current bookkeeper? +
The handover itself is usually straightforward; the work is establishing a reliable opening position. We reconcile back to the last trustworthy point and fix what is between there and today before running the first normal month.
Do we need to change accounting software? +
Not usually. We work in Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, Zoho and Odoo. Where the current system is genuinely the constraint, we will say so and scope a migration separately rather than folding it into monthly work.
Can you fix a backlog first? +
Yes. That is a defined catch-up engagement with its own scope, run before the monthly service starts so the ongoing cycle begins from a clean base.
Talk to M&J about accounting services
Tell us where you are and what is outstanding. We will come back with a scope and a clear next step rather than a generic quote.
- Transaction processing and ledger maintenance
- Bank and control-account reconciliations
- Customer and supplier ledger review
Prefer to talk? +27 87 078 2478
Request a consultation
An M&J consultant will come back to you with the next step.