Registering a business in South Africa

If you’re registering a PTY LTD in South Africa, you need to register it with the CIPC (Companies and Intellectual Property Commission). There are a few ways to do this.

• Yourself, via Bizportal, which is CIPC’s own simplified platform for registering and managing entities. Confusingly you can also do some of the same things via CIPC directly, and some things you need to do via CIPC, and often things are broken or down.
• Ask your accountant to do it for you. They’ll probably charge you a few thousand Rand for stuff that doesn’t seem very time consuming or difficult, but this is probably the easiest option if you have some budget for it and don’t like being frustrated.
• Use a third party provider like Govchain or InfoDocs. This companies act as a middleman between you an CIPC, and have their own platforms that are suposedly easier to use and sidestep some of the technical problems that you’ll no doubt run into if you try to use CIPC directly.

Once you’ve registered, you’ll have an obligation to file annual returns, maintain a share register, and all kinds of other fun paperwork, so make sure you’re ready for this before you press those buttons.

If not, rather don’t obsess over tax structures and just operate as a sole proprietor to get started. It’s much simpler and you probably don’t have to do any paperwork to make you first dollar.