You registered one company. Then you started a second line of business, gave it its own name, and now you have Acme Holdings (Pty) Ltd invoicing some customers as Acme Cleaning and others as Acme Logistics.
This is completely normal in South Africa, and it is legal. Where it goes wrong is in the bookkeeping — usually on day one, with a decision that feels tidy and is expensive to unwind.
The mistake: two sets of books
The instinct is to keep the brands separate. Two accounting files, two sets of invoices, two bank accounts, and you'll "add them together at year end."
Don't. SARS does not see two businesses. It sees one taxpayer.
One registered company means:
- one VAT number — and therefore one VAT201 per period
- one PAYE reference — one EMP201 each month, one EMP501 twice a year
- one income tax number — one ITR14
- one set of annual financial statements
- one CIPC annual return
If your books are split in two, every one of those becomes a manual consolidation. Your VAT201 is now a spreadsheet addition of two partial returns — and if you get audited, the thing SARS asks for is the ledger behind the number, which doesn't exist as a single set. Your EMP501 reconciliation can never tie, because the certificates live in one file and half the payroll journals in another.
The cost isn't the effort. It's that a manual consolidation has no audit trail, so an error in it is invisible until somebody senior looks for it.
The rule
> **One registered company = one set of books. Separate the brands inside it.**
The only time you genuinely need separate books is when you have separate registered entities — separate registration numbers, separate VAT and PAYE registrations. Then they are separate taxpayers and must be kept apart.
A trading name is not a taxpayer. "t/a" is a label, not a legal person.
How to separate them properly
Use tags, not separate books. Most accounting systems call these tracking categories, classes, or dimensions. In 360books they're under Accounting → Divisions & projects, as a Class.
1. Create a class per brand — Cleaning, Logistics — and give each its trading name.
2. Tag every invoice and bill with the brand it belongs to.
3. Prefix invoice numbers per brand (CLN-0001, LOG-0001) so each has its own sequence.
4. Give each brand its own bank account if you have one — it keeps reconciliation clean.
5. Optionally split revenue accounts per brand, if you want it visible in the chart itself.
You then get a profit & loss per brand, and a budget per brand, off the same ledger — while the VAT201, EMP501 and financials stay whole for the entity SARS assesses.
One detail worth insisting on: whatever you use should show you what is untagged. If the system silently drops untagged transactions from the per-brand view, your divisions will quietly stop adding up to your actual P&L and you won't know. Divisions plus untagged should always equal the whole.
What has to appear on the invoice
This is the part people get wrong, and it's the part that costs your customer their input VAT claim.
Under section 20(4) of the VAT Act, a valid tax invoice must show the supplier's name, address and VAT registration number. That means the registered name. You cannot invoice under a bare trading name.
So this is wrong:
> ABC Cleaning > Invoice #0001
And this is right:
> Acme Holdings (Pty) Ltd t/a ABC Cleaning > VAT No. 4123456789 > Invoice #CLN-0001
Your customer's brand recognition is intact, and their accountant can actually claim the input VAT. If a supplier ever sends you an invoice with only a trading name on it, ask for a corrected one — SARS can disallow the claim.
The same applies to your CIPC position: if you trade under a name that isn't your registered name, that trading name should be disclosed on your letterheads and business documents.
What stays under the registered name
Not everything should carry the brand:
- Payslips and IRP5s — an employee is employed by the company, not by a brand. One PAYE reference, one employer.
- Annual financial statements — the entity's, not a division's.
- Customer statements — a customer who buys from two of your brands should get one statement showing everything they owe you, not two.
The short version
Keep one company. Tag the brands. Put the registered name on the invoice with the trading name beside it. Report per brand for yourself; report as one entity to SARS.
Do it the other way and you don't discover the problem when you set it up — you discover it eighteen months later, at your first VAT audit, with two spreadsheets and no ledger to back them.
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360books keeps one company, one VAT201 and one EMP501 while giving you a P&L and a budget per trading division — with invoices headed correctly. Try the demo, no signup.