Page 13 - Q&A

Timeous BEE planning generally helps your business be more effective in its BEE
expenditure. Last minute BEE solutions can be more expensive and less efficient
BEE than more timeously planned options. With work pressures lower during the
lockdown, it may provide the necessary time to pay more (and not less) attention
to your BEE planning to ensure you identify and plan for initiatives which will
save you money in the long run and help obtain a good BEE certificate.

A good example could be to register some of your employees on learnerships.
Many employees are at home and have time during this period to make good
progress with a learnership, particularly with some service providers providing
effective online learnership options. Also take into account the fact that the
salary component of your employees on a learnership could count towards
your skills development target, this may help substantially to achieve your skill
development targets for your company.

Another useful consideration in this time is to revisit your current suppliers
and their respective BEE statuses. Procurement is a difficult element for many
companies to achieve compliance with and you may want to get ahead of
the curve and revisit your suppliers and even start looking for new suppliers
that have better BEE levels. This in turn supports my point above, that if you do
not have a BEE certificate, you may find yourself losing out to a competitor
that does.

As bad as the Covid-19 situation is, there are also advantages. Remember
that many of your targets for BEE compliance may be lower because of the
lockdown and resultant economic impact. BEE compliance targets are
generally based on elements such as turnover, net profit after tax, employee
costs and number of employees. This may mean that many of your targets
could be lower and you may be able to renew your BEE certificate working with
lower costs to achieve your targets. You may even find that your company’s
turnover has reduced and that you may now report under for example the QSE
scorecard instead of the Generic scorecard, just because your turnover is now
less than R50 million. Such a change could also make compliance easier and
at a reduced cost.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and Covid-19 may also have that for companies
that remain positive about the future and plan timeously and strategically
around BEE. Once the running starts, companies with a strong BEE certificate
may just have enough of an advantage to edge out their competitors.

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