• Medical Aid Tax Certificate – when this comes through in the post, immediately put it to one side so you don’t loose it.
• Retirement Annuity Tax Certificates – Same as the Medical Aid Tax Certificate.
• Ad hoc medical expenses – gather all your slips, and make your spreadsheet summary. Makes it quicker to slip that total onto your return is you have everything already summarised.
• Other income – If you have rent income, or any other income, keep all relevant documentation together, and make any necessary summaries. A few minutes a day from now will just make things so much easier later.
• Log book – remember that you cannot claim against your travel allowance this year unless you have a logbook. Make sure it is complete, and calculate your business travel. If you forgot to keep a logbook, start now on working it backwards from now till last year March.

Tax Season 2011 will probably start on 01 July 2011, and the sooner you get your return submitted, the sooner you get your refund or get rid of your stress.

Feel free to contact us for assistance with your calculation, and to help you to improve your salary structure to save you tax.

We are also offering specials to company on bulk returns for employees. Let us know if you would like to see our proposal in this regard.

Please note that this tax calculator uses only very basic calculations and will not give an accurate result for more intricate calculations.

If you have any questions about the tax return submission process, please contact us and we will assist you with the greatest of pleasure!

We will soon  be adding a contact page with Elaine’s story and contact information, and we look forward to growing dotnet Financial Services in the Cape region.

1. It’s malware and any decent virus scanner should pick it up
2. As with most malware, it appears to be Windows only (another reason to move to Linux or Mac)
3. The ransomware encrypts the data on your hard drive, overwriting the originals causing a complete loss of data, a virtual data kidnapping.
4. The author offers to decrypt your data, giving you access to your info again (the ransom part).
5. If you have current or recent backups (that you keep separate from your PC. You DO have offsite / off pc backups, right?) you can just restore it after you get rid of the malware.

One last thing to note from the article – apparently if you pull the power IMMEDIATELY when you get a notification that your files have been encrypted there is a good chance you will get most of your data back, but you have to act immediately. The article didn’t mention why but it’s probably because the encrypted files haven’t all been committed to the disk at that point and are still mostly cached in RAM.

If you haven’t already, consider the benefits of moving to Linux or Mac – both platforms are substantially more secure than Windows. Contact me if you need more info.

The problem

Spam is a real problem for most of us who have had an email address for a while.  And the longer you have an address, the more spam it gets.  My personal mail account receives about 30 spams a day – which is down from the 150 (approximate) spams a day before a few of the spam lords were taken down.

Tracking spammers and identifying spam is actually pretty difficult these days – as people become more dependent on email, they have less tolerance for false positives (mail marked as spam but which isn’t).  And false negatives (real spam that doesn’t get tagged) mean the spam ends up in your inbox.  And the only tools that most spam blockers have at their disposal are:

1. Checking if the connection comes from a known spammers IP address.  Fails if the spammer is coming from a ‘clean’ address, and we have to bee careful about blacklisting addresses too quickly – that may block legitimate mail.
2. Checking if the spam has been identified as spam by someone else.  Fails if the mail is new enough, or different enough that it can’t be easily matched to other spams.
3. Doing heuristic checks – getting the computer to ‘read’ the email to see if it looks like spam.  Computers aren’t intelligent, so this method, even though it’s the most  important part of the process, is where most of the false positives come from.

DKIM

Enter DKIM, DomainKeys Identified Mail.  What DKIM does is to sign all mail it sends with a key that can be verified from a public key stored in DNS.  This does a few things:

1. It ensures that your mail hasn’t been (substantially) altered in transit.
2. It uniquely identifies your organisation using a key that is prohibitively difficult (maybe even impossible without large amounts of luck) to forge.
3. It allows organisations to build reputations based on their domain keys, and these reputations can form the basis of trust relationships, which will allow less restrictive filtering for trusted domains.
4. Ties your reputation to your domain.  Your reputation is also your domains reputation./li>

You can get more info here, I’ve been using it for a while (I set it up to make sure that we didn’t get our newsletters flagged as spam), and so far the results have been really promising, even though we don’t use it for our primary domain.

If you need more information on DKIM, contact us.  DKIM is just one of the services we can help you with in the fight against spam.

Below is a brief outline of those items directly related to tax that will affect each of you.

Personal Tax

Firstly, on the personal income tax side of the things the following changes have come into effect:

• Primary rebate increased to R10,260 (plus R5,675 if you are over 65), meaning the “tax-free” portion of your income increases to R4,750.00 per month (R7,377.31 if you are over 65).
• Interest earned is tax free up to R22,300 for the year (R32,000 if over 65). Most foreign dividends are taxable, with foreign interest and dividends being tax free up to a maximum of R3,700 which is a sub-limit within the interest earned category.
• Amounts deductible for Medical Aid contributions have increased to R670.00 each for the first two dependants, and R410.00 for each additional dependant. All other medical expenses (including the balance of your medical aid contributions) are deductible if they exceeds 7.5% of your total taxable income (excluding retirement fund lump sums).
• 80% of any travel allowance is now taxable on a monthly basis with your salary (up from 60% in the 2009/10 tax year), and deductions can only be claimed against a travel allowance if substantiated by a logbook. IE No Logbook, No Travel Allowance Deduction!

Company taxes

Then from the corporate point of view:

• Corporate tax rates remain unchanged at 28% (33% for Personal Service Providers and Foreign Resident Companies)
• Small Business Corporations will be taxed as follows -
  • 0 – 57,000 @ 0%
  • 57,001 – 300,000 @ 10% of the taxable income above 57,000
  • 300,001 + @ 38% of the taxable income above 300,000
• Turnover Tax on Micro Companies (Turnover of less than R1 Million)
  • 0 – 100,000 @ 0%
  • 100,001 – 300,000 @ 1% of the taxable turnover above 100,000
  • 300,001 – 500,000 @ 3% of the taxable turnover above 300,000
  • 500,001 – 750,000 @ 5% of the taxable turnover above 500,000
  • 750,001 + @ 7% of the taxable turnover above 750,000

Capital Gains Tax

• Individuals – 10%
• Companies  – 14%
• Trusts – 20%

Events that trigger a disposal (getting rid of an asset) include a sale, donation, exchange, loss, death and emigration (You pay Capital Gains Tax when you emigrate, even if you don’t sell everything, because you will no longer be liable for taxes in South Africa once your emigration is finalised).

Specific exclusions include:

• R1,5 million gain/loss on the disposal of a primary residence or the disposal of a primary residence for an amount of R2 million or less
• Most personal use assets
• Retirement benefits
• Payments in respect of original long-term insurance policies
• Annual exclusion of R17 500 capital gain or capital loss is granted to individuals and special trusts
• Instead of the annual exclusion, the exclusion granted to individuals is R120 000 during the year of death.

Downloadables

I have attached copies of the actual budget speech, as well as the SARS issued Tax Pocket Guide for your reference, and please feel free to contact us with any specific queries related to the 2010/11 Budget Speech.

2010-11 Budget Speech

Pocket Guide – 2010-11

1. Website – We upgraded our website, and are busy adding useful features and functionality.  Chack back often to see what we’ve added.  Coming shortly will be the exchange rate tool – get the current exchange rate, as well as a history.
2. Streetpole Ads – if you are driving down Ontdekkers towards Johannesburg, just as you pass Horison view shopping center you will see our three ads.  They were designed to be easily visible, simple, and easy to read.  I think we accomplished that.  The first 3 people to send in pictures of the ads will win a small prize.  I’ll determine the winners by the order in which the emails arrive in my inbox.  Get cracking!
3. Mailing Lists – we have combined our friends and customer mailing lists (dotnet and Logoworld), and sent out our first newsletter today.  If you were not one of those lucky enough to get it, you can sign up here.  We will be running monthly (and possibly weekly) competitions, with cool prizes going to members on our mailing lists.
4. Google Ads – Look for us on your favourite website.  We are in the process of finialising our Google AdSense adverts, and you will soon see then wherever you go on the web.  Well, that’s the theory.  The ads will be pushing our entry level hosting solutions.  Look out for them.

Well, that’s what we’re up to.  It’s busy busy busy, but that’s good.  If you want any more info on any of our services, feel free to contact us and ask.

• If you have a travel allowance, remember to make a note of your odometer reading.
• Start your IRP5 reconciliations now, so that any necessary adjustments can be done on your February Payroll run.
  • Also remember that you will need each of your employees tax numbers on their IRP5′s, so ensure that you get all of this information!
• Start getting all your medical expenses together, if you haven’t already done so during the year. Every little bit counts, so keep all your slips!

If you have any other queries then give us a shout! Together we can make this tax year end VERY simple!

We’re now using WordPress, a platform better known as a blogging platform, but there are a surprisingly large number of websites built on top of it. The reason we chose it was for the following reasons:

1. It’s heavily tested and widely used – we’re unlikely to come across stupid bugs that stop us from editing our site.
2. It’s stable and mature – with so many people using it, most of the bugs have been found and fixed.
3. It’s got a better security record than Joomla. Joomla was the other CMS we were considering.
4. It’s a lighter install than Joomla – less functionality (barely) and a much smaller footprint.
5. Maintenance is a lot easier. Seriously.
6. It’s under constant development – new features and additions will be available on a regular basis.

Here’s wishing ourselves luck and hoping that we don’t have any more of those nasty problems that became so irritating in SilverStripe.