Straight answers to common questions

PayMe helps you register one. You answer the questions, a member of the PayMe team checks your documents, and PayMe lodges the application with CIPC on PayMe’s own CIPC account. CIPC - not PayMe - decides whether the company is registered and which name it will accept.

It costs R675 altogether, in one payment by card through Yoco or by bank transfer: R500 for PayMe’s help, plus R175 of CIPC’s own charges for registering the company and reserving its name, which PayMe pays over to CIPC. You can read what is involved before you start.

R675 altogether, in one payment. That is R500 as a PayMe service fee, plus R175 of CIPC’s own charges for registering the company and reserving its name. CIPC sets those charges, not PayMe, and PayMe pays them over to CIPC.

Every part is itemised before you pay anything. See pricing for what the fee covers and what it does not.

Free to start. There are five levels, from free upwards. A paid plan is paid ahead, by an owner of your organisation, by card for 1 to 12 months at a time, and nothing is charged again automatically. The pricing page says whether a plan can be bought yet.

Until PayMe limits anything by plan, every organisation can use all of PayMe whatever plan it is on, and you will be told at least 30 days before a limit applies to you. The other card payments in PayMe are the registration fee above and prepaid credits for reading tender packs.

PayMe gets you ready to compete for it, and helps you find it. Register your company, keep the documents government buyers ask for, see where you stand against what they require, search the tenders National Treasury’s eTender Portal publishes, and keep every bid’s closing time and returnables in one place.

Who wins is decided by the department running each tender, under its own rules. Being registered and ready is what lets you take part, and anybody offering to arrange the result is selling you something you should not buy.

PayMe makes sure you always know where every invoice stands, and what to do next. It keeps the record straight: the invoice, the date it was submitted and confirmed as received, when payment is due under the rule that applies, what has been paid, what was promised and by whom, and every follow-up and reply.

When something needs you - a promised date passes, or a payment date goes by with money still outstanding - it is on your home screen, with a follow-up drafted from your own figures for you to approve. The department decides when it pays, and most delays are resolved by being able to show your position clearly.

Yes - most of PayMe is for a company that already exists. Set up your company details, create a case for a piece of work, record the invoice with its amounts and dates, and PayMe works out when payment is due under the rule that applies.

From there you record payments as they arrive, record what an official promised and see whether it happened, and keep your follow-ups and their replies with the case. See the full list of what is built.

No. What government pays you is yours, in full. PayMe never handles the money, never sees your bank account and takes no cut of anything you recover.

Only once a person approves it, and never on its own. PayMe drafts a follow-up - or the email that carries an invoice you issued in PayMe - from the figures already on the case. A person then has to approve the exact wording, the exact recipient and the exact attachments before anything can be sent, and changing a single word withdraws that approval.

There is no setting anywhere that lets PayMe write to a department by itself. When a department replies, the reply is filed against the case and PayMe acts on none of it. PayMe cannot tell whether anybody read a message.

It lists one source. You can search the open tenders National Treasury publishes on its eTender Portal by sector, province and closing date, save a search, and add one to your workspace in a click. The listing is collected once a day, so a tender published today may only appear tomorrow.

A tender advertised somewhere else - a municipality may advertise only in a local newspaper - will not be in it, so you can also add one you found yourself. PayMe does not submit bids: you lodge the bid the way the notice tells you to.

The people you invite into your organisation, and what each of them may do depends on the role you give them. Your organisation's records are kept separate from every other customer's - in the application, and again in the database underneath it, so one mistake in one layer is not enough to expose anything.

As with any service you give records to, the people who run PayMe can reach the systems it runs on.

PayMe’s application and database are hosted in Germany (Frankfurt), and the documents you upload are kept in a private store in Western Europe. Both providers are bound by the European Union’s data protection law or by a data-processing agreement with PayMe, which give protection similar to POPIA. The Privacy Policy lists every provider PayMe uses, what each one receives and where it is.

Almost all of it, and each part says which. Every capability described on this site carries a label: available now, ready to use with its limits listed, or built and waiting to be switched on.

If you find something on this site that claims more than PayMe can actually do, tell us - we would rather know.