Confirming a tax table for all your employers

What confirming a payroll tax table covers for a bureau, why it is the firm's own copy, and what to check first for South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

For a business running its own payroll, confirming a tax table is a once-a-year task affecting one employer. For a bureau it is something else: a single confirmation that every client's PAYE will depend on. If the person who confirms it misreads a threshold, the error does not stay on one payslip. It runs through every employer the firm pays under that country's rules, every period, until someone notices.

That makes the confirmation one of the most consequential clicks in a bureau's year, and it deserves a working paper, a reviewer and a date in the calendar. This article explains what confirming does in Achekam, what it covers, and what to check first.

Tables ship unconfirmed

Achekam's PAYE calculation has no tax rates written into its code. The rates live in tax tables stored as data, and Achekam ships those tables pre-loaded but unconfirmed. No payroll run uses a table until a named person at the firm confirms it, with a note of what they checked.

The shipped tables at the time of writing are South Africa 2025/26, Nigeria 2026 and Kenya 2026. For Nigerian and Kenyan employers, payroll stays off until the firm confirms the shipped table.

The reasoning is simple and worth explaining to staff who find it inconvenient: a payroll product that quietly applies figures nobody at the firm has checked is a product that will one day apply wrong figures with nobody accountable. Requiring a named person to confirm makes that accountability explicit.

Confirming creates the firm's own copy

Confirming does not approve the shared table for everyone. It creates the firm's own copy; the shared table stays unconfirmed for other firms. The copy belongs to the firm rather than to a single employer, so every employer the firm runs under that country's rules depends on that one confirmation.

For a bureau, three consequences follow:

• One person's check covers every client. Choose the confirmer accordingly: someone senior who understands the tables, not whoever happens to be preparing the first run of the year.
• Another firm's confirmation does not help you. The firm cannot rely on a peer, a software vendor or a client having checked the figures.
• The note is your evidence. The note of what was checked is what the firm will show a client, or a reviewer, if a figure is later questioned.

Achekam requires only one named person to confirm. A bureau can sensibly ask more of itself: have one person prepare the comparison and a second review it before the confirmation is made, as it would for a pay run. The thinking is the same as in splitting pay run preparation and approval.

What to check against the authority's tables

Prepare a short working paper that sets each figure in the table beside the authority's published figure, and tick each one. For a South African table, Achekam's calculation applies the tax brackets, age rebates, medical tax credits and the retirement-contribution deduction limit, caps UIF at the ceiling and applies the SDL exemption, all from the confirmed table. Every one of those is a line in the working paper.

A checklist for any country:

1. The period. Does the table cover the pay dates you are about to run?
2. Brackets and rates. Every band boundary and every rate, not a sample.
3. Rebates, reliefs and credits. Age rebates and medical credits in South Africa; reliefs in Nigeria and Kenya.
4. Contribution ceilings and thresholds. Where a contribution stops or a levy starts.
5. Country-specific choices. For Nigeria, confirming requires choosing the pension coverage threshold, 15 or 3 employees, with a reason.
6. A test calculation. Work out one employee's PAYE by hand from the authority's tables and compare it with a draft run before the first real one.

Keep the working paper with the confirmation note, and file the authority's document you checked against beside it.

South Africa's 2027 table

For South African payroll paid on or after 1 March 2026, the firm must start its own 2027 tax table, and no 2026/27 South African table ships with Achekam. The firm can begin from the 2026 figures, update them, and confirm the result against the SARS tables before running payroll.

The authority's figures for that year are in SARS's Guide for Employers in respect of Employees' Tax (2027), which sets out the individual tax tables, rebates and thresholds announced in the 2026 Budget and how employers must deduct PAYE. That guide is the document to tick against. A business-side walk-through of starting and confirming the table is in confirming the 2026/27 tax table before payday.

For a bureau, the timing matters as much as the content: the first March run of any client cannot be calculated until the 2027 table exists and is confirmed, so the work has to be done before the earliest March payday across the whole client list, not before the first one someone remembers.

The Nigerian and Kenyan 2026 tables

For a Nigerian employer, payroll computes PAYE by each employee's State of residence, pension, NHF, NSITF and the ITF levy, on the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 bands. For a Kenyan employer, it computes PAYE, the Affordable Housing Levy, NSSF, SHIF and the NITA levy. Both run from the confirmed 2026 table.

Two further points for a bureau with Nigerian or Kenyan clients:

• Pension coverage must be decided in Nigeria. Beyond the threshold choice made at confirmation, a Nigerian run refuses until the employer has stated whether pension applies.
• There is no 2027 table in the app yet. Only the 2026 Nigerian and Kenyan tables ship, and the app can confirm a table but not create or edit one, so a 2027 table cannot be set up in the app. Agree with each Nigerian and Kenyan client, well before the first pay date of 2027, how January's payroll will be handled.

Put the table check in the bureau calendar now, for each country you run: a preparer, a reviewer, the authority's document, and a date safely before the first payday it affects.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.