For South African service-business founders building a legacy
Build like you believe it's going to work.
You already believe this business is going to make it. Good — that is the whole argument for setting it up properly now, while it is small and there is almost nothing to move. First staff member, first big client, the month you cross the VAT line: every one of those arrives with paperwork attached, and every one of them is easier from a business that already has its clients, quotes, invoices, books and team in one place. IBIS is that place — and it keeps a record of the whole thing you can hand to anyone who asks.
Three months free — then up to R240 back every month you use it. No card to start.
Built for the way South Africa does business — VAT, SARS payroll, ZAR and Yoco, the POPIA way.
- 15% VAT
- SARS payroll
- Yoco
- POPIA
- ZAR
A South African company, built for South African businesses.
A product of Legacy Live Web (Pty) Ltd · Bloemfontein · POPIA-ready. In early access with founding businesses across the Free State and beyond.
Nothing you're using knows about anything else you're using.
Almost nobody starts with software. You start with what is free and to hand: a spreadsheet of clients, an invoice maker you signed up for one Tuesday, WhatsApp for the chasing, the bank app for the truth, and a notebook for everything else. Each one is fine. Together they are a job — because the only thing joining them is you, re-typing the same figures into four places and holding the whole picture in your head.
The usual advice is to go and assemble a proper stack: a ledger, a payroll product, a job app, and something to wire them together. That works, and it costs two to three times what IBIS does — and it makes you, the person with the least time, responsible for choosing, connecting and maintaining the plumbing before you have your first ten clients.
The client spreadsheet
…that your invoices have never heard of.
The free invoice app
…that stops caring the moment you hit send.
The bank balance
…standing in for a set of books it isn't.
It's not that you're disorganised. It's that you've been made the integration.
Start with one job
Quote it, invoice it, get paid for it.
The job every service business does over and over, and the one place a free invoice tool leaves you on your own: everything that happens after you press send.
What a free invoice tool does
Makes a nice PDF.
And then nothing. You remember who hasn't paid. You chase them yourself. You re-type it all somewhere else at year end, and you find out in June whether the job was worth doing.
What IBIS does
Everything after send.
- A quote from your price list, turned into an invoice in one click
- A payment link on it, so a client can pay you from their phone
- Late invoices chased automatically, without you being the bad guy
- The books written as you go — no shoebox, no year-end catch-up
- What you're owed, what's overdue and what's actually profitable, today
One invoice posts to your general ledger, clears what you're owed, draws down stock, and moves your cash flow and goals — at once, with no double capture. That is the whole idea: do the job, and the admin is already done.
What's coming
Every good thing that happens to you brings paperwork.
Not warnings — milestones. Each of these arrives because the business is growing, and each one is easier if the system was already in place a year before it landed.
Your first employee
PAYE, UIF and SDL — and the 7th of every month
Hiring one person makes you an employer, with a monthly EMP201 due by the 7th and a reconciliation twice a year. It is completely manageable, and completely unforgiving if nobody told you it was coming.
How to pay your first employeeR1 million turnover
VAT registration becomes compulsory
Cross R1m in any twelve months and you must register for VAT, then file every two months and charge 15% on what you sell. Businesses that were already tracking VAT per line item barely notice the change.
VAT at 15%, explainedYour first corporate client
Proper invoicing, and a B-BBEE affidavit
Bigger clients bring procurement: a compliant tax invoice, a B-BBEE affidavit or certificate, sometimes vendor onboarding — and 30 to 90 day payment terms your staff can't wait for.
Invoices that don't get ignoredEvery year, quietly
Provisional tax, CIPC, COIDA
Provisional tax in February and August, your CIPC annual return, a COIDA return of earnings. None of it is hard. All of it is a date, and dates are what a business run out of a notebook loses.
Reading your cash flowIBIS knows these dates and carries them for you — the monthly EMP201, the bi-monthly VAT201, the twice-yearly reconciliation, the annual return — and prepares the documents behind them. You will still want a good accountant for the judgement calls. You will not need one to tell you what month it is.
Provable, not just tidy
A record that starts clean and stays that way.
Sooner than you think, someone will want proof rather than your word for it: a corporate client running you through vendor onboarding, a bank looking at a facility, a funder, a franchisor, SARS. What they are really asking is whether your numbers could have been tidied up afterwards.
In IBIS they could not. Every payslip, every payroll finalisation and every VAT figure is written to a hash-chained, append-only trail the database itself refuses to edit or delete. Corrections are new, visible entries — never quiet rewrites. And every statutory document carries a verification code that the person holding it can check themselves, without an IBIS login and without you in the loop.
A five-year-old business cannot buy this backwards. You can have it from your first invoice.
Tamper-evident from day one
The trail cannot be edited — not by you, not by us. That is an architectural fact, not a promise in a policy.
Every import keeps its origin
Bring your spreadsheet across and each row stays marked with where it came from. Imported history is never dressed up as something you recorded at the time.
Checkable by a stranger
A code on every VAT201, EMP201 and payslip. Whoever is holding it can confirm IBIS issued it and that their copy hasn't changed.
The "Intelligence" in IBIS
Profit on paper and money in the bank are two different numbers.
Most owners run on the bank balance, because it is the only number that updates by itself. It is also the one number that cannot tell you whether the job you just finished made money, whether you can afford the hire, or whether the busy month was a good month. Because every part of IBIS is connected, it can read the business as a whole — cash, sales, direction, operations, stock, books and people — and say in plain language what each part is telling you, and the one lever worth pulling this month.
- See the system — connected modules make hidden patterns visible.
- Read each part — a plain reading for cash, sales, stock, people and more.
- Know the next move — one clear lever, matched to the kind of problem you're in.
- See how you compare — anonymised benchmarks against similar businesses — a developmental read, never a league table.
- Free by default — the mechanical insight costs nothing; AI is an opt-in upgrade you only pay for when you choose it.
Every AI feature has a free, non-AI path that reaches a similar answer. We use AI deliberately and sparingly — so it never runs up your bill.
Start with one thing. The rest is already there.
Turn on what you use today and the rest of the system waits, switched off, until the month you need it — no new vendor, no new price, no new login.
Operations
Run the day-to-day
Clients, appointments, quotes and invoices, and goals tied to your real numbers — the operational heart of the business.
Finance
Books that keep themselves
A real double-entry ledger, financial statements, fixed assets and transaction tracking — posted automatically as you work, with submission-ready IRP5, EMP501, EMP201, VAT201 and payslips. Books that are already right when someone finally asks for them.
People
Pay your team, properly
The month you hire, payroll is already there — SARS PAYE, UIF and SDL worked out for you, payslips generated, every run posted to your books.
Growth
Help when you're ready for it
Free systems-thinking insights today; coaching, “rent a CEO for a day”, and consulting coming soon — unlocked by simply staying active.
Community
You're not doing this alone
Teamspace for the people doing the work, and the IBIS Community Platform for networking, accountability and triad groups — open to every business on IBIS from day one.
Bring the spreadsheet.
Your clients, your price list, the invoices you've already sent — import them and carry on. It takes minutes rather than a weekend, imports can only ever add to your records (never edit or delete one), and every row keeps a visible note of where it came from. Whatever you have, you keep.
Priced for a business that actually uses it.
Most software charges you the same whether it helped you or not. We'd rather be paid for being useful. IBIS is R300 a month for the whole platform — use it and up to R240 comes back. Run payroll and you add one flat amount for your team size. That's the entire model.
One company price a month
Three months free to start, then one figure for the whole system — from R300, stepping only with payroll headcount. Never per seat, never per payslip, unlimited users either way.
Use it, and it's more like R60
Work in your tools, keep an eye on your numbers, show up in the community — clear all four in a month and R240 of the R300 base comes straight back as credit. If you're the kind of owner who'll be in here every week, that's your real price.
Your data, always yours
If you ever stop paying, your workspace becomes export-only — never deleted, never held hostage. Download everything you own, anytime. The exit door is always open.
Only 100 lifetime memberships will ever exist — R10 000, once your free trial is over. Yours for life, and passable once to a named heir.
Built for the way South Africa does business.
Not a global tool with a rand sign bolted on. IBIS is built here, for here.
- 15% VAT shown per line item
- SARS-aligned PAYE, UIF & SDL payroll
- ZAR-first, with USD and EUR when you need them
- Yoco payments and prepaid credits
- POPIA consent and a named Information Officer
- South African English, dates and conventions
- Bank reconciliation built in
- One-click data export
Made in Bloemfontein by Legacy Live Web (Pty) Ltd — independently owned, with no investors and no board. Nobody can vote to put your price up, sell your data, or switch IBIS off because it stopped suiting a shareholder.
A system — and the people to grow with.
Software alone doesn't build a healthy business — people do. IBIS exists because real impact needs systems to sustain it, so alongside the tools you get your own team in one place, owners on the same road, and help for when you're ready to grow.
Open to all
Community
Networking, accountability partners and triad groups with owners on the same road — open to every business on IBIS from day one. Not a paid tier, not a bigger plan, not something you grow into.
Included
Teamspace
A second workspace for the people doing the work — jobs, hours and the recurring maintenance you have to be able to prove you did. Useful on your first day, however small the team.
Coming soonGrowth services
Business coaching, “rent a CEO for a day”, and consulting — earned by staying active for three months, then bought with credits or directly when you want them.
Questions, answered plainly.
Set it up now, while it's small.
Three months free, no card. Bring your spreadsheet, send your next invoice from IBIS, and let the books, the deadlines and the record look after themselves.
Your data is always yours — and the exit door is always open.