Compliance Calendar: SARS and CIPC deadlines, automated

What the Compliance Calendar actually does

The Compliance Calendar is one page, under Calendar in your dashboard, that lists every SARS or CIPC deadline that applies to your specific business, sorted by how soon it lands. Not a generic list of every deadline that exists in South Africa. Just the ones that are actually yours, based on whether you are VAT registered, what kind of entity you run, and when that entity was incorporated with CIPC.

It is a free tool, unlimited, the same as our VAT calculator and our other free tools. Deadline awareness is not something we think should sit behind a paywall, so every registered account gets it, whether you are on Free, Starter, or Pro.

How it is built: three inputs, one list

There is no separate deadline-entry form to fill in. The calendar reads three things you have likely already told SortedNexus in Settings, runs them through a fixed set of SARS and CIPC rules, and renders whatever comes out as a sorted list.

Nothing here needs a separate reminder system or a phone calendar synced with a subscription you have to remember to renew. The calendar becomes another view onto numbers and settings you are already keeping current for invoicing and VAT purposes anyway.

What shows up, and for whom

• →VAT201 return. Bi-monthly, due the 25th of the month after each two-month period ends. Shows up once you have a VAT number saved in Settings, using the same period math as our VAT Return Summary.
• →Provisional tax. The two mandatory payments for every entity type, computed from your financial year end in Settings: the last day of the sixth month into your year of assessment, and the last day of the year of assessment itself. Sole traders default to the fixed personal tax year, so this lands on 31 August and the end of February. A registered company with a different year end, a calendar year-end company, for instance, gets its own dates instead, 30 June and 31 December. See our guide to provisional tax for how the payments themselves are calculated.
• →CIPC Annual Return and CIPC Beneficial Ownership filing. Shown once your entity type is a (Pty) Ltd, NPC, or Close Corporation and you have entered a registration date in Settings. See our guide to Beneficial Ownership filing for why that one has to be current before CIPC accepts the Annual Return at all.

Where the CIPC dates come from

A CIPC Annual Return is due within 30 business days of your company's registration anniversary, not a fixed calendar date. The calendar finds your next anniversary from the registration date you entered, then adds a window on top of it.

That window is genuinely 30 businessdays under CIPC's own rules, and this app has no public-holiday calendar to count business days against, so the calendar uses 30 calendar days as an estimate instead. It is close enough for planning purposes, close enough to stop a deadline from sneaking up on you unnoticed, but it is not the authoritative date. Always confirm the exact date against your CIPC notice once it arrives.

What it deliberately does not cover yet

PAYE and EMP201 are missing on purpose, not by oversight. Nothing in SortedNexus currently tracks whether you have employees, and we would rather leave a deadline off entirely than show a monthly PAYE reminder to someone with no staff. That arrives once our Payroll Calculator feature does, since that is where an employee count naturally lives.

How we use it ourselves

ShellRick Tech runs on SortedNexus the same way our customers do, VAT number and CIPC registration date included, so the calendar we shipped is the same one we check. In practice that means opening the dashboard on a Monday, glancing at whatever has dropped into the "Due within 30 days" group, and treating anything flagged red, seven days or fewer away, as something to action that week rather than something to remember later. A bi-monthly VAT201 due date stops being a mental note we might drop and becomes something the page itself tells us about, at the top of the list, every time we look.

The part that actually changed our own habits was the CIPC row. Our Annual Return date is tied to an incorporation anniversary neither of us has memorised, and before this existed it lived in a shared reminder that occasionally got missed when one of us assumed the other had seen it. Now it just sits on the same page as everything else, computed once from a date we entered a single time.

Getting your own dates right

The calendar is only as accurate as the three inputs behind it, so the setup is entirely in Settings:

Nothing else to configure. Once those three fields are in place, the calendar fills itself in and stays current as the dates roll forward, no yearly re-entry required.

Sources

• ↗SARS: VAT
• ↗SARS: Provisional Tax
• ↗CIPC: Annual Returns

Disclaimer: This article is for general information and does not constitute tax, accounting, or legal advice. Dates shown on the Compliance Calendar are estimates for planning purposes, not official notices from SARS or CIPC. CIPC Annual Return and Beneficial Ownership dates approximate a 30-business-day window using calendar days. PAYE/EMP201 deadlines are not currently calculated. Always confirm your exact obligations and dates with SARS eFiling, your CIPC notice, or a registered tax practitioner or accountant.