I recently tried to work out exactly how much I should be getting taxed and how much I will be getting taxed next year. The South African Revenue Service (SARS) doesn’t have the most helpful website and the info to help you work this out is hard to come by if you don’t really know where to look. Once I got hold of this info (from a helpful relative, not SARS itself), I decided to build a little tool to help others with the same problem that I was facing. Thus, the SARS Calculator was born.
It’s a fairly simple app – the only somewhat complex bit was getting the calculations to work correctly. The values that it uses to calculate the result are hard-coded straight into the PHP and not drawn from any database. I opted to do it this way because it only requires info for two different years and using a database seemed slightly overkill. I used jQuery to make sure the form only accepted positive integers and no other characters. Aside from all that there’s not much else that’s very interesting about the mini project from a technical perspective.
Feel free to use it and please let others know about it (+1, Like and Tweet buttons are on the site).
Details:
- URL: http://www.sarscalculator.co.za/
- Javascript library: jQuery
- Main features: No database used and all calculations performed on the fly
Dear Hugh, something seems to be wrong here, or maybe its just me. If I look at the tax tables and rebates here (http://yourtax.co.za/tax-tables/) then the calculations don’t work correctly. Using R150000, I get these results from your calculator:
Your annual Tax Liability for 2011 is R27,700.
Your annual Tax Liability for 2012 is R0.
The second line (tax = R0) cannot be true unless I am confused or missing something.
Let me know?
An addition to last comment – maybe my proxy (UCT proxy) is causing issues and is caching a result. I am unsure.
Cheers – I’ll look into that. Probably just a small mistake in my maths.
I’ve actually just worked out what the problem is – I’m using < and not <=. Stupid mistake on my part. R150,000 is the cut off for a tax bracket in 2012 so it looks for values either less or more than that and not equal to it. Easy problem to fix – will get it sorted..
Awesome – thanks for a easy to use calculator.