Recording overseas software and hosting charges
How a software business books the monthly card charges for overseas tools and cloud hosting, with the vendor invoices kept and VAT left to advice.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Look at a software company's card statement and you will see the business model in miniature. A cloud hosting bill that changes every month with usage. A code repository. An error-monitoring service, a design tool, a password manager, a video-call subscription, an e-mail platform, a handful of AI tools the engineers are trying out. Most are billed from overseas, in dollars or euros, straight to a company card.
None of these charges is large on its own, which is exactly why they get neglected. At year end the accountant finds dozens of unexplained card lines, no invoices behind them and VAT nobody has thought about. For a business whose product runs on rented infrastructure, that cost deserves better. This article sets out a routine that keeps up month by month.
Many small charges and few proper invoices
The difficulty is not the amounts but the paperwork. Overseas tools rarely e-mail an invoice. You log in to each vendor's billing page to download it, often only as a receipt, sometimes without your company's name on it. Cloud providers produce detailed usage invoices, but they sit in a console only one engineer can open.
So the bank or card statement usually knows about the charge before your books do. The routine below starts from the statement and then attaches the paper.
Card or bank lines that become suggested journals
Import the card or bank statement each month. Achekam takes PDF, CSV, Excel, OFX, QIF, MT940 or CAMT.053, and every import is checked so that the opening balance plus the movements equals the closing balance.
Each statement line is matched by suggestion, and a person accepts each match. A tool charge that is not yet in the books becomes a suggested journal for a person to approve, debiting the expense account you choose and crediting the card or bank. The reconciliation completes only when every line is matched or explained, so a forgotten subscription cannot quietly disappear.
Set up a few expense accounts that reflect how a software company actually spends, rather than one "software" bucket:
- Hosting and infrastructure: cloud compute, storage, content delivery, domains.
- Software subscriptions: developer tools, design, productivity and security tools.
- Sales and marketing tools: CRM, e-mail platforms, analytics, ad tools.
Investors ask about hosting as a share of revenue, and that number is only as good as your account split.
Downloading the vendor's invoice into Financial Intake
Once a month, someone downloads every vendor invoice or receipt for the period and uploads them to Financial Intake. Each supplier invoice or receipt is read into its fields and becomes a suggested posting with a journal proposed for it. AI can suggest, but only a person approves and posts.
Three things to know:
- Scans and photos are read only when an outside OCR service or an image-reading AI key is set up. Most vendor invoices are text PDFs, which do not need one.
- VAT that is not printed stays empty. Overseas receipts often show no VAT at all, and the reading does not invent it.
- An uploaded invoice becomes a journal suggestion, not a bill on the Bills list. For a card charge that has already been paid, that is what you want.
If the card line has already been posted from the statement, do not post the intake suggestion as well. Keep the uploaded invoice as the evidence for the line you already have, and do not approve the duplicate suggestion. Decide which of the two routes is your main one, statement first or invoice first, and stick to it.
When a supplier bill makes more sense
Not every overseas cost is a card charge. A hosting reseller that invoices monthly on terms, an offshore development agency, or an annual enterprise licence paid by bank transfer is better recorded as a supplier bill. A business records bills line by line with VAT; a bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts, and it can be paid in full or in parts from a chosen bank account.
Bills give you what card charges do not: an approval before the cost lands, an unpaid balance you can see, and a record of part payments.
VAT on foreign services: take advice before claiming anything
This is the step most often got wrong. Services bought from a supplier abroad can bring VAT duties for the buyer in the buyer's own country, and the rules differ between South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. In Nigeria, for example, the NRS sets out who must withhold VAT, including on supplies by non-resident suppliers, and how it is remitted and reported, in its guidelines on the withholding of VAT.
Two Achekam details matter here. A South African business's bills take 15% or 0% VAT per line and post input VAT to the ledger, so a bill line at 15% claims input VAT; do not set that on an overseas receipt that shows no South African VAT unless your accountant tells you to. Nigerian and Kenyan businesses should know that bills do not yet use their own country's VAT rate: they offer 15% or 0% and default to 15%, so set foreign-service lines to 0% and let your accountant handle any VAT due separately.
A monthly sweep of vendor invoices
Put this on one person's calendar for the first week of each month:
- Import the card and bank statements for the month.
- Download every vendor invoice or receipt from the billing pages, including the cloud console.
- Upload them to Financial Intake, or file them as the evidence for lines already posted.
- Approve the suggested journals to the right expense accounts, with VAT set as your accountant agreed.
- Cancel any tool nobody used last month.
- Finish the reconciliation with nothing left unexplained.
The same intake flow handles transport costs in carrier invoices turned into suggested postings, and clean hosting figures feed directly into burn and runway.
Next month-end
Choose the person who owns the sweep, give them access to every vendor billing page, and run the routine once for last month. The first month takes longest; after that it becomes a regular part of closing the month.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
