Business Landscape, CIPC & VAT

The foundation of our dataset is the CIPC (Company and Intellectual Property Commission) database. This is the official company registration database and tracks all legal records of company registrations and directorships.

We incorporate the SARS VAT database, to enhance our modelling with regard to company size and business activity. Approximately 3 000 new companies are being registered for VAT every month (the required threshold is R1m revenue per year) and these are likely to be active.

We supplement this dataset with some derived fields, such as probability of being active; size category; industry etc. We sell this enhanced dataset or part thereof – or simply the CIPC / VAT database – to our clients.

Augmentation

Base data is augmented through analytical algorithms that segment the companies and directors into segments that are used to indicate:

• Director Influence Scores - level of influence that the director has based on directorships held in different level companies. For example, a director of a Listed Company will have more influence than the director of a single-director company not registered for VAT
• Company size is based on the sum of the Directors Scores. The greater the number of directors, and the more the relationships with other significant directors, then the higher the directors scores, and therefore the Company Score. We carry 9 relative size categories.
• Groups of businesses that are tied as a common entity through directors are flagged as related companies.
• Transformation Score indicates the level of racial transformation (based on directors) in each company.

Business Change Metrics

We also track these metrics over time to identify companies that are growing, merging, or downsizing, etc. These scores change when new directors join the board, or a related director score changes. Alerts can be set up on specific businesses, or types of businesses, to alert you to changes.

Director Change Metrics

We monitor directors that are becoming more influential in the business landscape. This is used to track key directors, established and up and coming. Alerts can be set up to bring your attention to directors who are increasing in influence, and their contact details can be purchased.

Leads

We research companies to provide a leads database with contact details. We partner with other vendors to maintain the contact details, provide more detailed industry classifications and size the businesses based on number of employees. We score the leads based on the level of confidence we have of the record. Currently there are 180 000 records in our Leads dataset with varying levels of detail and through a partnership with a credit bureau we can enrich the remaining companies with director cell phone and/or email addresses.

Geocoding

We have extensive experience in geocoding addresses to a lat/long coordinate and can handle large database geocoding requests. We aim to map the customer to their actual ERF, but have established methodologies to provide geocoordinates where insufficient data are available for an ERF geocode.