Everything you need for your tax return — and why you should send more than that

Something changed this year. Clients started asking me what their retirement annuity costs them.

Not one or two. Enough that I stopped treating it as a coincidence. And not one of them asked because of anything I did — they'd been reading and watching people like Carla Venter, who publishes Money with Carla (youtube.com/@MoneywithCarla) and has been telling South Africans the same thing over and over: always check your fees. She's careful to say she isn't a licensed financial adviser and that people should speak to a professional. The message landed anyway.

What struck me was that I was already holding most of the answer.

Their retirement annuity certificate arrives on my desk every year. It has to — it's how the deduction gets claimed. I'd been taking one number off it, putting it in the return, and filing the rest.

Before I go further, here's what I won't do

I won't tell you to move your retirement annuity.

I'm an accountant. Telling you to switch a financial product is advice, and that requires a licence I don't hold and a process I'm not part of. Anyone who'll tell you to move it in the same breath as showing you the fee should make you curious about why.

What I'll do is the arithmetic, on your provider's own disclosed number, and hand you the result. What you do with it is a conversation for you and your adviser.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it does, and I'll come back to it.

Because a tax return asks for everything and uses almost none of it

Think about what you hand over every year. Where you work and what you earn. What you own and what you owe. What you're putting away for retirement, what your medical scheme cost, what your property earns, what you sold and what you paid for it.

Then it produces one number, you pay it or you get some of it back, and the whole file goes into a drawer for five years.

That's a lot of information about your life to use once.

First, the boring and useful part

Here is the checklist we actually work from. Not a marketing version of one — the real document, the same one we send clients.

Five pages. Personal details to confirm, then every category of document with a tick box for received, outstanding or not applicable. Employment, travel and logbooks, investment income, retirement funds, medical, rental, business, capital gains, crypto, loan accounts, assets and liabilities.

Work down it, tick as you go, and email us what you have. Most people find two or three things they'd forgotten. That is the entire point of a checklist.

If nothing else on this page is useful to you, that document is.

Where returns actually go wrong

Not in the arithmetic. In what never arrived.

The travel allowance where no logbook was kept, so the whole claim falls away. The R40,000 of medical bills the scheme rejected, sitting in a drawer. The s18A donation certificate nobody asked for. The base cost of a property sold last year, which is in a file from 2009 that has to be found before anything can be calculated.

None of that is a hard tax question. It's a question of whether somebody asked you in time.

Then the part most people don't get offered

Once you're gathering documents anyway, the marginal effort of sending a bit more is small. What it changes on our side is not.

Send us your IRP5 and tax certificates and you get a tax return, filed correctly, with a computation showing how every rand of tax was worked out.

Add asset costs and market values and the same documents produce a statement of assets and liabilities — what you own, what you owe, at cost and at value, with the unrealised gain shown separately. Do it again next year and you have a net-worth trend.

Add fund benefit statements and cost disclosures and you get a retirement-funding review: whether you're using your full deductible contribution, and what your funds actually cost.

Add per-property and per-business detail and each one gets its own income statement, so you can see which of them makes money.

Add prior year assessments and you get up to five years side by side, which is where trends — and errors — become visible.

Same documents. Different amount of them.

Cost and market value are not the same question

This one is worth its own paragraph, because it's where most people give us half of what we need.

Cost is what SARS asks for on page 15 of the return. It's also what sets your base cost when you eventually sell, and getting it wrong means overpaying capital gains tax years from now, quietly, with no way to tell it happened.

Market value is what the thing is worth today. SARS doesn't ask. It's also the only figure that tells you where you stand.

Give us cost only and we can file the return. Give us both and the same paperwork produces an asset report worth reading. It costs you one extra column on a spreadsheet.

Now, back to the retirement annuity

South African providers have to disclose an Effective Annual Cost — the EAC — on a standard set by ASISA. It breaks the total cost into four parts, VAT included: investment management, advice, administration, and other. It has to be shown over one, three and five years, and out to the end of the term or age 55.

You can ask your provider for it. It's a standard disclosure, not a favour, and it should arrive as a document rather than a conversation.

Ask for it, because a percentage is very good at hiding.

Run R5,000 a month, escalating 6% a year, growing at 10%, for forty years, and the calculator on our site gives you R54.8 million before costs. Take 1% off the growth rate and it's R44.0 million — the fee cost you R10.9 million. Take 3% off and it's R29.0 million.

Nearly half of it, gone to a number that appeared on a statement as a decimal.

And here's the honest caveat, because it matters: a higher cost is not automatically wrong. Some products do more, and guarantees and advice are real things that real people pay for on purpose. The problem isn't paying. The problem is paying without knowing.

So take the number to your FSP and ask them to justify it. That's the right conversation, with the right person. They may have a perfectly good answer. If they don't, you'll have learned something more useful than a refund.

And the return itself

If you'd like to check your own tax before we do, there's a free tax calculator on our site. No signup, nothing to install. It shows the full computation line by line rather than just a total, so you can see how the answer is built.

It handles a straightforward salaried position. It doesn't do rental property, foreign income, logbooks, crypto or capital gains — those are the parts that need a person.

Where to start

Download the checklist. Work down it. Send us what you have, plus the two extra columns on your assets and the cost disclosure on your retirement funds.

Then get in touch — the form takes a minute and we reply within one working day, or book a 30-minute call from the same page.

You're going to gather these documents anyway. You may as well find out what they say.