What this person actually earns.
A salaried buyer hands over three payslips and the income is a number. A self-employed buyer hands over a set of financials and a personal bank account that disagree with each other, and somebody has to decide which is true. Banks usually resolve that by looking at the personal account alone and declining. This builds the real figure instead, and proves it line by line.
From net profit to what the owner can sustainably take
Every line carries the document it came from. Nothing here is an estimate.
The double-count guard
The control that stops this module being used to manufacture income.
Why this control exists
The business pays his car and his phone. Adding those back as income is correct — they are a benefit he receives. But if you add them back and then do not charge them as personal expenses, you have invented R11 000 a month out of nothing and put a family into a bond they cannot service. That is reckless lending under section 80 of the National Credit Act, and it is the single easiest way to get this wrong. The system refuses to release a figure where an add-back has no matching expense.Business records to personal bank account
The credibility test. If this does not come to nil, the income figure is not defensible and no amount of presentation will fix it.
It reconciles to the cent
Everything the company recorded as paid to or for Mr Khumalo is accounted for: either it arrived in his bank account, or it was paid directly to someone else on his behalf and we can name who. There is no residual and no rounding plug. A credit officer can follow every line to a document.What the business settled directly
Real income that a personal bank statement can never show.
Every credit to the personal account, classified
Twelve months to 28 February 2026. Filter by what the classification concluded.
R62 000 of cash deposits stays excluded
Regular cash deposits with no invoice behind them are the oldest trick in self-employed lending. They are flagged, excluded from income, and named in the certificate so the bank can see we found them and chose not to count them. If Mr Khumalo can produce invoices they can be reinstated — by a person, with a reason recorded. Including them would have lifted the figure by R5 167 a month. He qualifies without them, which is the point.Three years, built the same way each time
One good year is not an income. Banks want to see that the number repeats.
Which basis to submit on
Change it and watch what he qualifies for. The certificate records which was used and why.
We submit on the average, not the best year
The latest year is his strongest, and using it would support a bigger bond. Using the three-year average instead costs him R11 439 a month of assessed income and he still qualifies comfortably. A figure the bank's own credit team would have arrived at is worth more than a figure they have to argue down — and if the deal later goes into arrears, the file shows we took the conservative view.Nobody has decided this yet
Section 71 of POPIA: a person cannot be subject to a decision with legal consequences based solely on automated processing. An income figure that decides whether a family gets a home is exactly that decision.
Prototype. Mr Khumalo, Khumalo Plant Hire, the financials, the bank data and the sign-off are all simulated. The method is real: add-backs restricted to non-cash, non-recurring and owner-benefit items; add-backs paired to affordability expenses; reconciliation of business records to personal receipts required to nil; cash of unproven origin excluded; three-year basis; human sign-off before release. Tax is shown per assessment rather than recomputed. Affordability here uses a 30% instalment-to-gross screen for illustration — each bank applies its own, and the real test is the bank's full expense analysis, not this one ratio. Nothing in this module is advice to any party under the FAIS Act.