Most expense tracking apps available to South African freelancers were not built here. We built MyExpense the other way around, and that decision shaped everything.
When we started building MyExpense, the first decision we made was also the one that shaped everything after it: the product would be designed around South Africa's ITR12 tax return from day one, not adapted from a foreign budgeting or invoicing app after the fact.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. Most expense tracking apps available to South African freelancers were not built here. They were designed for US or UK tax systems, then localised with a currency switch and a few renamed categories. The underlying structure, the way expenses get grouped, the assumptions about what counts as deductible, none of it was built around how SARS actually wants information presented on an ITR12 return.
For a salaried employee, that gap barely matters. For a sole proprietor or freelancer filing their own return at the end of the tax year, it is the difference between expense data that drops cleanly into the right fields, and expense data that needs to be manually re-sorted and second-guessed before it is usable.
We built MyExpense in the opposite direction. The categorisation structure inside the app maps to how SARS organises business expenses for ITR12 purposes, not to a generic categories list borrowed from elsewhere. Mileage is tracked against the SARS deemed rate, not a generic distance log. Receipt scanning is built to extract the details that matter for a deduction to hold up, not just a total to remember for budgeting purposes.
This was a deliberate, narrower bet rather than an attempt to be everything for everyone. We are not trying to be a general personal finance app that happens to support South African users. We are trying to be the clearest, most direct route between spending money running a business and having that correctly reflected on a tax return, for the specific group of people who deal with ITR12 every year.
South Africa's roughly 3.8 million self-employed sole proprietors, freelancers, and independent contractors who file an ITR12 return each year and need their expense records to match what SARS actually asks for.
Being built this way from the start also means the product does not carry the compromises that come from retrofitting a foreign system later. There is no awkward mapping layer between what the app calls an expense and what SARS calls it. There is one structure, and it is the one that matches the return that eventually needs to be filed.
When you capture an expense in MyExpense, you are not choosing from a list of categories that someone later has to translate into SARS terminology. You are selecting the ITR12 category directly, the same one that appears on your return. When you log a business trip, the km rate applied is the SARS deemed rate for the current year of assessment, not a customisable field you have to remember to update.
When filing time arrives, the export is built to match what your tax practitioner or the eFiling system expects. Nothing needs to be re-categorised, re-totalled, or explained. The record you kept during the year is already in the right shape.
We think that focus is the right trade-off for the people we are building for. If you have ever finished a freelance tax season wishing your expense records had simply matched what SARS asked for in the first place, that is the specific problem we set out to solve.
MyExpense tracks expenses in ITR12 categories from the moment you capture them, so your records are already in the right shape when filing season arrives.
This article is general information about how MyExpense is designed and is not tax or legal advice. Tax rules, rates and category definitions can change. Confirm your specific filing obligations with SARS or a registered tax practitioner.