Before MyExpense existed as a product, it existed as a pattern. The same handful of frustrations kept surfacing, almost word for word, across conversations with sole proprietors, freelancers, and independent contractors trying to manage their own tax compliance.
Four frustrations came up again and again, described in almost the same words by people doing very different kinds of work.
Receipts were not literally in a shoebox anymore, but they were scattered just as widely: photos on a phone, PDFs in an email inbox, paper slips in a car, a few notes scribbled in a diary. Nobody had a single, reliable place where a year's worth of business expenses lived, which meant tax season started with hours of searching before any actual filing work could begin.
People had tried budgeting and expense apps before, almost always built for a different country's tax system. The categories did not match what SARS asks for. Mileage logging did not account for the SARS deemed rate. None of it reduced the manual work of preparing for ITR12; it just moved the disorganisation from paper to an app that did not actually solve the underlying problem.
The third, and probably the most consistent, was a quiet assumption that an accountant was required just to stay compliant, even for someone running a relatively simple, single-person business. That assumption pushed people toward paying for professional help they often could not comfortably afford, or avoiding the issue altogether and hoping it would sort itself out.
None of these problems were really about tax knowledge. They were about the absence of a tool built to bridge day-to-day business activity and what SARS actually requires at filing time.
Almost everyone who drove for work, whether tradespeople visiting client sites or contractors travelling between jobs, either kept no real log at all, or kept one inconsistently enough that they doubted it would hold up if SARS ever asked questions about it.
Existing options were either too generic, built for a different country's system, or assumed a level of accounting support that most sole proprietors and freelancers do not have and should not need for a straightforward business.
An app that captures expenses and income as they happen, categorises them the way SARS organises an ITR12 return, tracks mileage against the actual deemed rate, and removes the need to reconstruct a year of financial activity from memory and scattered receipts in October.
We did not invent this need. We listened to it, repeated almost identically across a wide range of people doing very different kinds of work, and built the product around solving it directly rather than working around it.
MyExpense captures receipts and income as they happen, files them the way SARS organises a return, and logs mileage at the deemed rate.
This article is for general education and does not constitute personalised tax advice. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a registered tax practitioner.