Accounting Solutions
For someone starting out, choosing an accounting system may be daunting. There are many options in the market, and all and sundry are offering free advice. We have seen this from small, single-founder startups to multi-million-rand manufacturing startups. The anxiety level is the same. We have found, however, that most clients can find a solution in one of these packages:
stub Accounting
Best for: sole traders, freelancers, and micro-businesses that need invoicing and basic bookkeeping without the overhead of full accounting software.
Features
- Invoices, quotes, credit notes, pro forma invoices and customer statements
- Convert quotes to invoices (and back) without re-capturing data
- Recurring invoices on a schedule
- Multi-currency invoicing
- Online payment buttons on invoices (card, SnapScan)
- Bank feed sync with FNB, Capitec, TymeBank, Absa, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Investec, RMB
- Automatic transaction categorisation from bank feeds
- Profit & loss, cash flow, balance sheet, trial balance and VAT reporting
- Chart of accounts and general ledger
- Fixed asset register with automatic depreciation
- Inventory and stock tracking
Benefits
- Lowest barrier to entry of the five, built for people who don't want to think about accounting software
- Quotes and invoices can be sent from a phone in the time it takes to close a sale
- Bank sync means less manual capturing and fewer reconciliation errors
- Straightforward enough that a business owner can run it without a bookkeeper on staff, though we'd still recommend one reviews the numbers periodically
Sage Business Cloud Accounting
Best for: small businesses and sole traders who've outgrown a pure invoicing tool and need proper cloud accounting, still without the complexity of a desktop system.
Features
- Two tiers: Start (invoicing, basic reporting) and Standard (adds inventory, purchase orders, budgeting, multi-currency)
- Snap-a-photo receipt and invoice capture on Standard
- Direct bank feeds from all major South African banks
- Automated VAT 201 preparation and submission to SARS
- Budgeting against set targets, with variance reporting
- Project Tracker using Analysis Codes
- Time Tracking add-on
- Online payments via integrated payment providers
- Works on any device, browser, iOS, Android, with real-time sync across all of them
- Unlimited users on all plans
Benefits
- SARS-facing features (VAT 201 automation) reduce the admin load at return time
- Runs on low bandwidth, which matters outside the metros
- Scales from Start to Standard without a platform change or data migration
- Bank-level encryption and automatic cloud backup, no local backup routine to manage
Sage 50cloud Pastel
Best for: established small-to-medium businesses that run inventory and more complex accounting than a cloud-only product handles comfortably.
Features
- Desktop-installed, cloud-connected: local backup and offline capability alongside remote access
- Up to twenty users, unlimited company licences (Partner edition)
- Direct bank feeds and automated reconciliation
- Serial number and warranty tracking on stock items
- Sage 50cloud Intelligence Reporting: drag-and-drop or template-based Excel reporting, drilling down to transaction level
- Sage Contact: syncs customer records and balances with Outlook
- Sage Capture: photograph receipts on mobile, post straight into the ledger
- Time and Billing module for chargeable-hours tracking
- Automated backup to OneDrive
- Integration with Microsoft 365
Benefits
- Handles data volumes and transaction complexity that cloud-only products start to strain under
- Doesn't depend on an internet connection to keep working: the cloud features are additive, not a dependency
- Excel-native reporting means finance teams can build reports in a tool they already know
- The natural next step up when a business outgrows Sage Business Cloud Accounting, without abandoning the Sage ecosystem
Xero
Best for: growing small businesses, particularly those that want the widest possible choice of third-party app integrations, or work with an accountant who's a Xero specialist.
Features
- Bank feeds from 21,000+ global institutions, including all major South African banks
- Hubdoc-powered receipt and bill capture, data extracted automatically into transactions
- SARS-compliant tax invoices and built-in VAT return preparation
- Over 1,000 third-party app integrations (PayFast, Yoco, SimplePay and more, locally)
- Multi-currency accounting
- Project tracking: budgeting, quoting, invoicing and time recording by job
- Purchase orders and inventory management
- Payroll for a small number of employees, built in
- Real-time collaboration with your accountant or bookkeeper inside the platform
- JAX: Xero's AI assistant for surfacing answers from your financial data
Benefits
- The app ecosystem is the strongest of the five: if a business needs a specific integration (e-commerce, CRM, industry-specific tools), Xero is more likely to have it
- Genuinely cloud-native, so there's nothing to install and updates happen without input
- Well suited to businesses that work closely with an external accountant, given the collaboration tools
- Worth knowing before you commit: pricing has moved upward and some functionality has been pulled from lower tiers in recent updates. Check the current plan features against what the business actually needs, not what it needed a year ago
Too many options and no clear answer?
That is exactly what we help with. Book a free scoping conversation, and we will tell you straight which system fits your business, and which ones do not.