Accounting software for import & export traders in South Africa

The supplier invoice is one number. Then comes freight, marine insurance, customs duty, the clearing agent's fee, port storage, and road transport to your warehouse — often arriving weeks apart and sometimes in three different currencies. By the time all the bills land, the stock has already been sold at a margin you guessed at. Most traders find out they underpriced a whole shipment only when the year-end numbers come back.

Import VAT paid to Customs on the SAD500, VAT on local clearing and freight charges, zero-rated export sales that need proof of export on file — each sits in a different pile of paper. When the VAT201 is due on eFiling, someone spends days matching customs release notifications to supplier invoices and hoping nothing was claimed in the wrong period.

Goods in transit, goods in a bonded or third-party warehouse, goods on your own racks, and goods already allocated to a customer order. A single spreadsheet can't tell your sales team what is genuinely available to promise, so you either oversell and disappoint a buyer or sit on cash tied up in stock you forgot you had.

Your warehouse supervisor, two sales reps, the buyer, the bookkeeper and your external accountant all need to see something. On per-seat accounting tools that's five or six licences, so most trading businesses ration access — and end up with one person emailing screenshots and CSVs to everyone else, which is how errors creep in.

Raise a purchase order for the shipment, then attach freight, duty, insurance, clearing and transport costs to it as the invoices arrive. Tallium AI spreads those costs across the units by value or quantity and updates the cost price of every SKU in the container. Your gross margin per product is real, not estimated, so quoting a customer stops being a gamble.

Tag each transaction correctly as you go — standard-rated local sales, zero-rated exports, import VAT paid at Customs, and input VAT on clearing and freight services. Tallium AI keeps the supporting document attached to the entry, so when you complete the VAT201 on SARS eFiling the figures come from records you can actually open and show. Please confirm current rules and rates with SARS or a qualified local tax professional before filing.

Track goods in transit, warehouse bins and allocated stock in the same system, with multi-location visibility for anyone who needs it. Scan on receipt against the purchase order so short shipments and damaged units are caught at the door, not three months later. Sales sees available-to-promise quantities in real time and stops selling air.

Warehouse, sales, buying, finance and your external accountant all get their own login on the same flat monthly price, with roles and permissions deciding who sees costs and who only sees stock. Nobody is emailing spreadsheets around because everyone is already looking at the same numbers.