Pay your own labour and file the month end returns

Collect the hours daily with the job, the activity and the person on each line, separate normal time from overtime and from work on a Sunday or a public holiday, and have the foreman approve the week before it goes anywhere near payroll.

Яагаад: Hours captured only as a weekly total pay people correctly and tell you nothing. The same lines are the basis of the labour cost on the job, the substantiation of an expense and loss claim under clause 26.5 of the JBCC principal building agreement, and the earnings figure in the Return of Earnings. Collecting them once, at the right level of detail, is what stops three departments reconstructing the same month three different ways.

Record the rate for each grade, together with the minimum the National Minimum Wage Act sets and any higher rate a bargaining council agreement imposes where one covers this work and this area, then add the on-costs: leave, the benefit fund contributions the agreement requires, the employer share of the unemployment insurance contribution and the skills development levy.

Яагаад: The rate a person is paid and the rate a job is charged are different numbers, and estimators who confuse them lose the difference on every hour of the contract. Writing the on-costs down once, as percentages on the bare rate, is what lets an estimate and a payroll come from the same figures instead of from two habits.

Run the pay period from the approved hours, produce a payslip for every worker showing gross pay, each deduction separately and the net, and keep the payroll register that the returns will be built from.

Яагаад: A payslip is a legal entitlement, not a courtesy, and a deduction that appears on it without a name is the fastest route to a dispute with a bargaining council or a labour inspector. The register behind it is also what an audit reconciles the EMP201 declarations against at the end of the tax year, so it has to be right monthly rather than corrected annually.

Calculate PAYE on each employee's remuneration for the period, the unemployment insurance contribution at one per cent from the employee and one per cent from the employer up to the monthly earnings ceiling, and the skills development levy at one per cent of total payroll on the employer side, which small employers below the payroll threshold are exempt from.

Яагаад: The unemployment insurance contribution is capped and the skills development levy is not, so a site that grows its labour force finds the two moving apart, and a spreadsheet built once at the ceiling of a previous year quietly under-deducts for every month after the ceiling changes. Holding the rates and the ceiling where they can be updated in one place is the difference between a correction and a reassessment.

Put the PAYE, unemployment insurance and skills development levy totals for the month onto the single EMP201 return, declare and pay it by the seventh of the following month, and keep the payment reference against the period it settles.

Яагаад: The seventh is a hard date and it falls in the same week as the payment certificate you are waiting to be paid on, which is why contractors miss it. A late EMP201 also breaks the tax compliance status that a public sector tender checks, so a missed month at one site can cost a bid at another.

Submit the annual Return of Earnings under the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act 130 of 1993, pay the assessment and keep the letter of good standing on file with its expiry date. Collect the same letter from every subcontractor before it starts on site.

Яагаад: Regulation 5(1)(j) of the Construction Regulations, 2014 makes it the client's duty to ensure, before any work commences, that every principal contractor is registered and in good standing with the compensation fund or with a licensed compensation insurer, so on a construction site the letter is checked at the gate and not only at tender. It also expires quietly, and an uncovered subcontractor is not somebody else's problem: when one of its people is hurt there is no fund behind the claim and it comes back up the chain to you.

Raise the tax invoice on the certified amount with VAT at 15 per cent under the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991, hold a valid tax invoice for every input you intend to claim, and post the month's labour cost to the jobs the timesheets allocated it to.

Яагаад: Input tax is claimable against a tax invoice and against nothing else, so a delivery note, a statement or a quotation in the file is a cost you carry the VAT on yourself. Posting the labour back to the job in the same run is what makes the cost report on that job a fact rather than an allocation somebody does at year end from memory.