Verification season: five things to settle now

If your financial year ends in the next few months, the period your next certificate will measure is already well under way. Spend and evidence you sort out now still count. Gaps found a month before verification are hard to close, because by then the year is over and nothing new can be added to it.

Every season we see files lose points over gaps that were visible months earlier. The reason is simple. A verification agency scores what you can prove, not what you did, so most of the work that decides your next level is the work of getting the paper in place while the year is still open. These are the five things I would settle first.

Know which year is being measured

Confirm which financial year the verification will measure, and when your signed annual financial statements will be ready. Put both dates in writing and share them with finance, HR and procurement. Your turnover, procurement spend and profit come from those statements, and several targets are calculated from those figures. Until the statements are signed, nobody can tell you for certain whether you have met them, so the date they will be ready sets the pace for everything else on this list.

Skills spend you can evidence

Training that happened but was never recorded is training the agency cannot count. For every training intervention in the year, collect the invoices, proof of payment, attendance registers and learner details, and keep them together with the course they belong to. Then check that your learnerships are registered with your SETA. It is a small job while the year is open and a hard one in the month before verification, when people are on leave and training providers are slow to reply.

Supplier certificates, where one file moves the score

Of the five, this is the one where a single document per supplier decides how a whole line of spend is treated. Preferential procurement looks at what you spent with your suppliers during your measurement period, and recognises each rand according to the supplier's B-BBEE status. Spend with a Level 1 supplier that qualifies as an empowering supplier counts at 135%: every R100 you spend with that supplier is recognised as R135 when your procurement score is calculated. That multiplier is why your own customers ask for your certificate, and why you should be just as careful with your suppliers'.

The other side of the rule is the one people miss. Spend you cannot support with a certificate or sworn affidavit valid for your measurement period counts at 0%, although it still sits in your total procurement spend. The same R100, without a valid document behind it, adds nothing to what you can claim and still adds R100 to the total you are measured against. You are scored on money you cannot claim.

So go through your supplier list now. Ask every supplier whose certificate has lapsed, or will lapse before your year-end, for a current one. Remember that EME and QSE affidavits are valid for 12 months from the date the commissioner of oaths signs them, so the papers of many smaller suppliers will run out during your year without anyone noticing.

Ownership records that agree with one another

Your share registers, shareholder agreements and the paperwork behind any trust or flow-through structure should be signed, current and consistent with one another. The agency reads them side by side. If the register shows one shareholding and the agreement describes another, you will be answering a query, and the answer has to come from a document rather than from memory. If anything in your ownership changed during the year, check that every record caught up with it.

The agency's diary, and your customers'

A certificate is valid for 12 months, and once yours lapses your customers may not be able to recognise their spend with you. That is the supplier problem above, seen from the other side of the table: a lapsed certificate makes you the unsupported spend in someone else's file. We suggest booking your verification four to six months before your certificate expires, so the agency's diary is never the reason you run out of time.

If you do one thing this week, put your year-end and your certificate expiry date on the same page and work back from both. Everything above hangs off those two dates.

If you would like a second pair of eyes, ask us for a readiness check. We will look at your supplier file and your evidence against your measurement period, and tell you what to chase while there is still time.