Borrowing costs fell by a third. Import costs went the other way.

Banks priced loans off Treasury bills. When the 91-day bill paid 10.3%, lending to a small business at 24% made sense to a bank. At 5.4%, the bank has nowhere safe to put money and has to lend to earn. That is why credit is growing at 35.5%. But the rate on your existing facility did not fall on its own. Loans written in 2025 are still carrying 2025 pricing, and the bank has no reason to tell you that the market has moved.

Non-food is transport, fuel, energy, rent, materials and services. That is the cost base of almost every business that is not a farm. Food is what your customer buys. So the gap between 6.8% and 3.0% describes exactly the squeeze we identified last week from the producer and consumer price divergence: your inputs are inflating at more than twice the rate of the grocery basket your customer uses to judge whether prices are "going up". When you raise prices, your customer measures your increase against a food shelf that is barely moving, and concludes you are gouging.

This is the largest change to small business tax administration in Ghana this year and it has been almost entirely overshadowed by the PAYE band story in the same Act. A trader turning over GH¢700,000 previously had to maintain full accounts, compute chargeable income, and file as a standard taxpayer. That business can now pay 3% of turnover, which on GH¢700,000 is GH¢21,000, and skip most of the accounting overhead. For businesses with thin margins the arithmetic can go the other way, so this is a calculation, not an automatic win: at a 10% net margin, 3% of turnover equals a 30% effective rate on profit.

Put the two provisions side by side and the result is that a consultant, hairdresser, repair shop, cleaning firm, training outfit or logistics operator is required to be VAT-registered whatever its size, and is therefore disqualified from a 3% presumptive regime that some commentary describes as open to service providers. If that reading is right, the relief announced this month reaches goods traders and effectively skips the entire small services economy. We are flagging this as an apparent conflict, not asserting it as settled law, because the two Acts have not been read against each other in any GRA guidance we could find. This is the single most consequential unanswered question of the week for small businesses.

PAYE is an employer obligation. If you under-deduct, GRA pursues the employer for the shortfall plus interest, not the employee. If you over-deduct, the employee recovers it on their annual return and you have caused inconvenience rather than liability. The risk is therefore one-sided, and the correct response to genuine ambiguity is to apply the more recent bands. The September return is due 15 October, which means a business that has not yet run or filed September payroll can still land this correctly.

Two things changed at once. The direction reversed, and the buffer thinned. Reserves at 4.5 months are down from around five months and US$12.9bn at end-June, so the cushion available to smooth the currency is smaller precisely as pressure returns. And the spread between the interbank rate and the bureau rate, roughly 5%, is the real story for small importers, because almost no SME buys dollars at the interbank rate. The published rate describes a market you cannot access. Your true import cost base is the bureau rate, and it is already at GH¢12.20.

This is a terms of trade squeeze in its purest form, and it explains the currency. Ghana's export earnings are concentrated in gold, and gold is falling. Ghana's import bill is dominated by refined fuel, and crude is rising. The country's recent currency stability was built substantially on gold receipts feeding reserves. When the gold price turns, that engine loses power, which is why reserves fell to 4.5 months of cover in the same period the cedi gave up 9.5%. For a business owner, the chain runs: gold down and oil up, so reserves thinner, so cedi weaker, so imports dearer, so your margin narrower. None of those steps are visible in a headline inflation figure of 5.0%.

The immediate effect is genuine relief: one major cost line is fixed until 31 December, which is rare enough to be worth building a plan around. But look at the assumption. PURC modelled the quarter at GH¢11.5646 per dollar, and the interbank rate on 25 September was already GH¢11.6157, with bureaux at about GH¢12.20. The regulator's working number was behind the market before the quarter even began. Tariffs are largely driven by imported gas and dollar-denominated costs, so if the cedi keeps sliding, the gap does not vanish. It accumulates and lands in the first quarter review. Read this as a deferral, not a cancellation.

A 2.4% nominal increase against 5.0% headline inflation is a real terms pay cut of roughly two and a half percentage points, and against non-food inflation of 6.8%, which is closer to what a farming household actually spends on fuel, transport and inputs, the squeeze is wider still. Cocoa income is the demand engine of a large part of rural Ghana between October and March. Retailers, transport operators, school proprietors, phone and electronics sellers and building material dealers in the Ashanti, Western, Eastern, Central, Bono and Ahafo cocoa belts all plan their strongest quarter around this money arriving. It will arrive, but it will buy less than last season. The reference to protecting cocoa from diversion is also a signal: when the domestic price sits near the statutory floor and neighbouring markets pay more, smuggling pressure rises, and volumes passing through licensed buyers can fall short of expectations.

Note the age limit carefully. The original notice, issued 5 August, set 10 years. That was replaced in mid-August by a 15-year limit, and both versions are still circulating in Ghanaian media, including in coverage published recently. An importer planning against the 10-year figure is turning away stock that is legal, and an importer who read only the earliest headline may have cancelled orders unnecessarily. The operative number is 15 years. The harder constraint is the certificate: this moves inspection to the country of origin, before shipment, which means the decision point is now weeks earlier in the buying cycle than it used to be. A vehicle that arrives without a CoC is not fined, it is refused, and the cost of a refused unit sitting at Tema falls on the importer.

Almost no Ghanaian SME operates in the oil economy. You operate in the non-oil economy, and that part of the country grew at 5.4% this quarter against 8.5% a year ago, a deceleration of more than a third. The headline figure of 6.0% is being supported by oil output, which is genuinely good for government revenue and the external accounts but does not put customers through your door. Meanwhile the government is running well ahead of its fiscal targets, which is reassuring for the IMF programme and for the currency, but it is achieved partly by spending less than planned, and government spending is demand. Strong public finances and a slowing private economy tend to arrive together.

For three years, holding cash in Treasury bills was a rational business strategy in Ghana. You could earn a double-digit return with no operational risk, and plenty of owners quietly ran their treasury harder than their trading operation. That trade is finished. At 5.4% against 5.0% inflation, the real return is roughly zero before tax, and against non-food inflation of 6.8%, which is what your business costs actually do, holding cash loses purchasing power every month. This changes the hurdle rate for every internal investment decision. A piece of equipment, an inventory position or a hire no longer has to beat 10% risk-free to be worth doing. It has to beat approximately nothing.