Comparison · Four ways to run compliance
South African businesses run compliance four ways: an annual audit, a consultant on retainer, a spreadsheet someone owns, or continuous monitoring software. These are not interchangeable — they catch different failures at different costs. Here is the comparison, honestly drawn, including where software loses.
Comparison
Comparison
The audit is not the enemy. A proper audit or verification examines things software cannot — it applies professional scepticism to your claims, not just your configuration. Its weakness is arithmetic: it happens on one day, and regulatory risk accrues on the other 364. A finding that appears in March waits a year to be found.
The consultant is not the enemy either. Judgment is exactly what you should pay a professional for. The mismatch is using professional hours for vigilance work — paying advisory rates for someone to check whether a deadline moved or a register is current. That is monitoring, and monitoring is what software does at a frequency and price a retainer cannot match.
The spreadsheet is the honest default, and the most dangerous of the four — not because it is wrong, but because nothing tells you when it becomes wrong. It fails silently, and it fails completely the day its owner resigns.
The pattern that works: continuous monitoring as the base layer, professionals for judgment, and the annual audit as the external check it was always meant to be — a confirmation of what you already knew, not a discovery of what you missed.
Comparison
No. If you are a Generic entity, or a QSE under 51% black owned, a certificate still comes from a SANAS-accredited verification agency, once a year (an EME, or a QSE at least 51% black owned, swears an affidavit instead). What monitoring changes is what happens in between: you know your indicative score before verification day and, on Pro, you can see the gap analysis before committing spend and have the evidence pack assembled before the agency asks for it.
Sometimes, honestly. A sub-R10M business with simple taxes, no procurement exposure and one person who genuinely maintains the file can get by. The failure mode is that spreadsheets fail silently: the deadline column nobody updated, the rule that changed in a gazette nobody read, the file that left with an employee. The question is not whether a spreadsheet can work — it is whether anyone would notice when it stops working.
No. Each module page says what Komply does not do, and the judgment stays with your accountant, attorney, verifier or Compliance Officer. Consultants and Compliance Officers are excellent at judgment: regulatory opinions, complex remediation, sign-off that carries professional responsibility. Software is better at vigilance: watching every deadline, register and scannable surface at a frequency no human retainer can match. Most businesses that take compliance seriously end up running both — the software for monitoring, the professional for the heavy lifts.
For the map of what each regulator actually requires, read POPIA vs B-BBEE vs SARS vs FSCA: the SA compliance stack explained, or start from the four-module overview.
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