Private clients
We work with private clients whose tax is genuinely complicated.
Trusts, offshore holdings, a disposal, more than one structure at once. We do the full calculation, and produce one report you and your financial adviser can work from.
Brandon Iverach, Professional Accountant (SA) and Registered SARS Tax Practitioner PR-0025122.
01 · The work
Tax calculations most software will not do.
A private client’s tax is rarely one return with one number at the end.
It is a capital gain computed from a base cost nobody kept records of. Foreign income with a credit that has to be claimed correctly or lost. A trust distribution that has to be traced to the right hands in the right year. A loan account that carries a consequence every year it stays outstanding. A disposal that lands either side of a change in residency and is a completely different calculation depending on which.
We do that arithmetic in full, on your actual numbers, and we show our working.
02 · The report
One document, and it is built to be discussed.
Every private client receives an annual Wealth & Tax Report: your tax position and your asset position for the year, in one place, built from your own certificates and statements.
It is produced in-house and it is not a standard output of filing a return. Most people have never seen their whole position laid out on one set of pages.
It is deliberately written to be handed to somebody else. Your financial adviser can read it and see what the tax consequences of a decision actually are, rather than estimating them. That is the conversation we are trying to make possible — the two of you deciding with the arithmetic already done.
03 · Structure
Where the asset sits.
Personally, in a company, or in a trust. Each is taxed differently, each behaves differently on a disposal, and each behaves differently on death.
A loan to a trust carries its own consequences every year it remains outstanding, not just in the year it is made. Assets moved between structures are usually disposals, with tax attached, which is why the cheapest time to get the structure right is at the start.
Most structures we see are sound. What is missing is the arithmetic showing what the structure costs or saves each year.
04 · The wrapper
The same money, taxed four ways.
Two people can buy the same investment and keep very different amounts of it.
A retirement annuity, a tax-free savings account, a discretionary portfolio, an endowment, a company, a trust. The underlying investment can be identical in each. The tax is not.
One is deductible going in and taxed coming out. One is taxed going in and never again. One attracts capital gains tax on every disposal along the way, with an annual exclusion that is lost if it is not used. One is taxed inside the fund at a flat rate that suits some marginal rates and not others.
We set out what each one does to your tax, at your marginal rate, on your numbers. We do not tell you which fund to put in it.
05 · Timing
When is worth more than what.
This is the part almost nobody quantifies.
The same contribution, made on either side of a year end, lands in a different year of assessment. A gain realised across two tax years uses two annual exclusions instead of one. A disposal taken before or after a change in residency is a completely different calculation. A contribution sized to your actual remuneration, rather than a round number, is the difference between a full deduction and a wasted one.
None of this changes what you invest in. All of it changes what you keep.
06 · See it in rands
See it in rands.
We model it rather than assert it. Our public calculator shows what a contribution, an annual increase and the cost of holding the money do over forty years. It does not choose an ETF, a unit trust or a fund, and it does not rank providers.
The detailed models we run for clients go further — the wrappers, your marginal rate, and the year each decision lands in. Those work off your actual numbers.
07 · What we are not
What we are not.
We are not a financial services provider. We do not recommend investments, we do not sell financial products, insurance or forex, and we earn nothing from what you hold, where you hold it, or who you hold it with.
We are not registered with IRBA and do not provide audit or assurance services.
We work alongside your adviser, your broker and your attorney. We do not replace them, and we are not competing for the rest of your business. It is a good deal easier to give you a straight answer about a product’s tax treatment when we do not earn anything from it.
Start with the numbers.
Bring your current position and the decision you are weighing. Thirty minutes is usually enough to see whether the timing or the structure is worth changing.
Accounting Connect (Pty) Ltd · Reg 2018/528820/07 · Oudtshoorn, Western Cape. We work with clients across South Africa, remotely.