Do your EMP201

What EMP201 does in Worklog

EMP201 is the monthly return you send SARS for the tax and levies you take off wages: PAYE (employee tax), UIF (an employee share and an employer share) and SDL (a skills levy, if it applies to you). It is due by the 7th of the month after the wages were paid — or the last business day before the 7th when it falls on a weekend or public holiday, which is the date Worklog shows.

Worklog does the sums for you. It looks at the pay runs you have captured for a month, adds up the PAYE, UIF and SDL, and shows you one total to pay SARS. You still submit the return yourself on SARS eFiling.

Before you start

• EMP201 is on the Team and Complete plans.
• You need staff on your Staff Register. If you have none yet, the screen sends you to Staff Register to add them first.
• You need to have done your Pay Run for the month. The EMP201 totals come straight from your pay runs.
• Have your PAYE reference number set. If it is missing you will see a yellow warning with a link to Business Details, because SARS needs it on every EMP201.

Open EMP201 and pick the month

1. From the Compliance card, open SARS, then the Employees’ tax tab, then the "EMP201 — monthly" sub-tab. The two beside it are "EMP501 — reconciliation" and "IRP5 — certificates". A login that has EMP201 but not SARS opens just this return, from the EMP201 tile or the Compliance row, with no other SARS tabs.
2. It opens on last month — the one whose EMP201 is due by the 7th. Use the ‹ and › arrows at the top to move to another month. The month and year show in the middle.
3. Read the dark blue card. Along the top it shows the month and how many employees were paid, then the lines: PAYE (employee tax), UIF — employee, UIF — employer, and SDL (only if it applies to you).
4. Check Total due to SARS at the bottom of the card, and the Due date shown just under it — the 7th of the following month, or the last business day before it when the 7th is a weekend or public holiday.

ETI comes off your PAYE

The Employment Tax Incentive (ETI) is a break for hiring younger workers, and it lowers the PAYE you actually hand over. If any of your staff qualify for the month, Worklog works out the ETI from their pay runs and shows a Less: ETI claimed line on the dark blue card, subtracting it from the total so your Total due to SARS is what is really left to pay.

The ETI for a month is the ETI for the pay that is in respect of that month, not the month it was paid in. A next month's salary paid early counts towards next month's ETI.

When you tap Mark EMP201 as filed, Worklog books the ETI that return claims as income, under Other income — Employment tax incentive (ETI), on the account the month's PAYE was paid from and dated the last day of the month. That is what makes your books match the bank: the pay runs recorded the full PAYE, and the ETI is the part SARS let you keep. The full PAYE stays a wage cost, and the ETI is exempt from income tax, so the annual return, the IRP6 and the Tax Jar take it back out. Undo the filing and the ETI goes with it; it can't be typed in by hand, so it is never counted twice. Its amount and date are the return's: to change them, undo the filing and mark it filed again. Which account it reached, and a note, can still be changed by tapping it in Banking.

Check the detail

Further down the screen, under the heading Pay runs in [month], Worklog lists the pay runs that make up the total. Each line shows the worker, their gross wages, the pay date, and how much PAYE and UIF came off.

If the card shows nothing and you see "No pay runs recorded for [month]", it means you have not done a pay run for that month yet. If the month has ended and you submitted a nil EMP201 for it anyway, you can still mark it filed — see Mark it as filed below.

Mark it as filed

Once you have actually submitted the return on SARS eFiling and paid, come back and record it in Worklog so you have a history.

1. Submit the EMP201 on SARS eFiling and pay the total.
2. Back in Worklog, on the correct month, tap Mark EMP201 as filed.
3. The screen then shows a ✅ Marked as filed note for that month, and the return appears under Filing history with the amount and date. There is no “what you paid” box here, and that is deliberate — your pay run already booked the PAYE, UIF and SDL as expenses on pay day, so Worklog will not post them a second time. Tap “↩️ Made a mistake? Undo this filing” to take the record back. If marking it filed booked an ETI, undoing it takes the ETI back out too, and needs full access to Income; without it, the screen says who can undo it in place of the Undo button.

Send the month's figures

Below the filing note there are two buttons. 📄 PDF gives you the month's EMP201 working on your letterhead; 📊 CSV / Excel gives you the same numbers — PAYE, UIF (employee plus employer), SDL if it applies, any ETI claimed, and the Total due to SARS — as a spreadsheet. On a phone, each button opens your phone's share menu with the file attached, so you can send it on WhatsApp or email, or save it to your files. On a computer it downloads. Handy for sending the figures to your accountant before you file on eFiling.

The SDL nudge

SDL (the Skills Development Levy) only kicks in once your payroll gets big enough. If your wages over the last 12 months — averaged over the months you ran payroll and scaled up to a full year — pass the SDL registration threshold and you have not switched SDL on yet, Worklog shows a yellow nudge on this screen so it does not catch you by surprise.

EMP501, IRP5, UIF and COIDA

The two tabs next to EMP201 finish the year's employees' tax.

• EMP501 — reconciliation: a twice-yearly reconciliation of your EMP201s. The interim is due 31 October and the annual is due 31 May. This is where you tie these monthly totals back to your staff's IRP5/IT3(a) certificates on SARS e@syFile. A period that has ended with no pay runs and no EMP201s in it still shows Mark EMP501 as filed, so you can record a nil reconciliation (as R0) — unless that period is from before your books began, or your login can't see Pay Run. A login that can't see Pay Run gets no Mark EMP501 as filed at all, even for a period whose EMP201s it can see, because it can't tell what was paid; its card shows only what was declared on those EMP201s, with a line saying pay runs aren't open to it, and no difference, PDF or CSV. If your staff or pay runs can't be read, the screen says so instead of reconciling nothing against nothing.
• IRP5 — certificates: each employee's figures for the tax year, split across the SARS source codes you capture on e@syFile. Worklog cannot issue a certificate (a valid IRP5 carries a certificate number minted by SARS), but it does the adding up and tells you whose details are missing before e@syFile rejects them.

Employees’ tax — EMP201, EMP501 and the IRP5 certificates — sits under SARS. UIF and COIDA answer to Employment & Labour and the Compensation Fund, and have their own screen: Dept of Labour.

Good to know

Worklog keeps your records and works out the figures, but it is not a tax adviser. If you are unsure whether SDL applies to you, or about anything on your return, check with SARS or a registered tax practitioner.

This money is already in your books

Below Mark as filed there is a card headed 📗 This money is already in your books. It lists the PAYE, UIF and SDL your pay runs booked on pay day, totals them as “Booked as expenses”, subtracts any ETI claimed, and tells you what you pay SARS by the due date. If it agrees with the return it says so, and it reminds you that the EFT will arrive already unticked when you import your statement.

If the books and the return differ it turns amber — open the pay run, void it and run it again rather than editing the expense rows. If none of the month’s PAYE, UIF or SDL is booked as its own row, that is not a fault: pay runs from before Worklog split them out were booked as one gross wage line, and a member without access to Expenses sees no rows at all. “See the rows” shows each entry.