eFiling and uFiling – The Big Timesavers

As a business owner you can’t look past the fact that the internet plays a big role in businesses these days. It’s not just a time waster for employees that sit day in and day out on Facebook or Youtube. The internet is also there to make life easier for business owners and this is especially true for small business owners that must save as much time as possible, by not doing admin and spending most of their time getting income. There are luckily two sites from government institutes that help with this

eFiling.

Hopefully most business owners has heard of efiling and at least checked it out. eFiling is the electronic filing website for SARS. Here you can submit and pay most things related to SARS, from VAT returns, EMP201 returns (PAYE, UIF, etc), IT34 returns and much more. It’s a dead simple task once everything is set up. Taking VAT returns as an example, simply go to the heading for VAT returns, you should see your latest return which was issued by SARS, click on it, complete the electronic form (which by the way looks exactly like the printed form) press submit to submit the form and presto. You can also either instruct SARS from the website to deduct the payment via your bank account using a debit order or manually pay and fax the proof. This all saves time and thus also money. Go and check out eFiling for yourself at the eFiling website.

uFiling.

This is the submission site for the Department of Labour (UIF). Now first thing to note here is that even if you do your UIF payments through the EMP201 submission using eFiling or submitting it manually, you should STILL submit the UIF (UI-7) form every month to UIF. This is where uFiling comes to play. Using uFiling you can submit that UI-7 quickly and easily using the website. All the details are already completed for you, so you just press submit and off you go. If you pay your UIF through SARS, you still need to submit these forms, but instead of having an option to instruct UIF at the end of the submission process to debit the amount from your account, it will tell you that the payment is handled through SARS. And that is how simple it is. So why not go and check out the uFiling website.

I know in my business this has saved a lot of time, from filling in forms manually and posting/faxing/dropping them off at the SARS offices. If you need help setting up these sites, send us an e-mail at sars (at) sbnetwork.co.za