Every month, 1% of your payroll leaves for SARS as the skills development levy (SDL). Nevus claims it back through your WSP and ATR submission, turning it into SETA grants, B-BBEE points and people who are properly qualified, without you adding a single person to HR.
More than 25 years of skills development work in the Western Cape, for 80+ South African employers. We submit into CETA, merSETA, FP&M SETA, AgriSETA, CHIETA, FoodBev SETA, TETA, W&RSETA and Services SETA.
Enter your annual payroll. These are the statutory rates, not our estimates.
Levy 1% of the leviable amount; mandatory grant 20% of the levy; 49.5% of levy income is allocated to discretionary grants. Employers under R 500 000 annual payroll are exempt.
Manufacturers, engineers, contractors and distributors across the Western Cape
Also working with Schuurman Lasercut (Pty) Ltd, and around eighty more employers, from twelve-person workshops to national manufacturers.
The problem
1%
30 April
20 points
Most companies we meet are paying the levy in full and claiming none of it. Not because they do not care, but because the submission is a job nobody in the business has time to own. That is the job we do.
Services
Five pieces of work. Most clients start with one and end up handing us all of them.
We prepare and file your Workplace Skills Plan and Annual Training Report with your SETA before the 30 April cut-off. That includes the training matrix, the headcount breakdown by race, gender and occupational level, and the evidence pack behind it.
Unlocks the mandatory grantMandatory grant claims, plus discretionary grant applications for learnerships, apprenticeships, bursaries and skills programmes. We track the windows, prepare the motivation and chase the payment through.
Mandatory and discretionaryEvery role in the business mapped against the NQF and against what the job actually needs. You end up knowing exactly where the gaps are, who is ready for the next level, and where the training budget should go before you spend a rand of it.
Before you buy trainingThe SDF role is a legal requirement and it has to be registered with your SETA. We act as your appointed SDF, so the responsibility sits with a specialist instead of being bolted onto an HR manager who already has a full desk.
Outsourced, registered, accountableThe same training spend can earn you almost nothing or almost all twenty points, depending on who is trained, at what NQF level, and how it is recorded. We structure the year so the spend you were making anyway lands on the scorecard.
Priority element, protectedProcess
Three stages. The first one costs you a payroll export and half an hour.
Send us your payroll summary and your SETA registration. We come back with what you have been entitled to, what was claimed, and what was left on the table. If the answer is that you are already doing fine, we will tell you that.
Skills audit, training matrix, Workplace Skills Plan, Annual Training Report and the grant applications, all prepared, signed off by you, and submitted under our SDF registration well before the deadline.
Training records maintained as the year goes, learner paperwork kept current, quarterly check-ins so nothing is reconstructed in a panic in April. Next year's submission is half-built before the window opens.
Below that, the levy is small enough that the admin rarely justifies itself. Above it, the grants, the scorecard points and the risk of a missed deadline all get big enough that having a specialist own it changes the arithmetic.
We are not a training provider, so we have no reason to steer you toward courses you do not need. We are the people who work out what your business actually requires, get it funded, and keep the record straight.
What we need from you: a payroll export, your SETA registration details, and someone who can sign off the plan once a year.
Plenty of people just want to know whether this even applies to their company before they commit to a meeting. Leave a name and a number and we will call you back. A straight ten-minute conversation, no presentation, no obligation.
Sectors
We work across all of them, but these are where we have the deepest history, and where the SETA rules have the most sharp edges.
| Sector | SETA | Where it usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Construction & civil engineering | CETA | Site-based staff and sub-contractors left out of the headcount, so the plan understates the workforce. |
| Manufacturing, metals & engineering | merSETA | Apprentice records that do not match the training matrix when the grant is audited. |
| Chemicals, polymers & plastics | CHIETA | Mandatory safety and compliance training not recorded as skills spend, so it earns nothing. |
| Food & beverage manufacturing | FoodBev | Seasonal and contract staff excluded from the plan, then queried at submission. |
| Agriculture | AgriSETA | AET and literacy training run informally, with no evidence pack behind it. |
| Textiles, furniture, print & packaging | FP&M | Businesses that straddle two SETAs registering with the wrong one entirely. |
| Transport & logistics | TETA | Licence and code renewals treated as operations cost rather than claimable training. |
| Wholesale & retail | W&RSETA | High staff turnover making the headcount in the ATR disagree with payroll. |
| Professional & business services | Services | Professional body CPD not carried across into the WSP at all. |
Questions
Any employer registered to pay the skills development levy, which is any employer with an annual payroll above R 500 000, has to submit a WSP and ATR to their SETA if they want the mandatory grant back. It is not a criminal offence to skip it, but skipping it forfeits the money and weakens your B-BBEE position.
30 April each year, covering the levy year that ran from 1 April to 31 March. Some SETAs open their portal months earlier and a few grant short extensions, but planning around an extension is a bad habit. The ones that do not extend simply close.
You start this year. Prior years cannot be reclaimed. The mandatory grant is forfeited once the window closes and there is no back-dating. What we can do is get the current cycle filed properly and make sure the same thing does not happen again. Most of our long-standing clients came to us exactly this way.
The mandatory grant is 20% of what you paid in, released once a compliant WSP and ATR are in. Beyond that, 49.5% of levy income sits in a discretionary pool that employers apply for competitively, funding learnerships, apprenticeships and bursaries. That is not automatic, and it depends on the quality of the application and the SETA's priorities for the year.
Yes. The Skills Development Act requires levy-paying employers to appoint an SDF, and the SETA must have that appointment on record. The role can be filled internally or outsourced. Outsourcing it is common because the work is concentrated into a few months of the year and needs someone who follows the SETA's rule changes.
By your main business activity, set against the SIC code on your SARS registration. It is not a choice. Companies that do several things, like a manufacturer with a large distribution arm, regularly end up registered with the wrong SETA, which is one of the quieter reasons grant claims get rejected. It is one of the first things we check.
No, and deliberately not. We plan, submit, claim and administer. When training needs to be delivered we help you select an accredited provider on merit, but we do not sell you the course, so we have no reason to recommend training you do not need.
Yes. We are based in Cape Town and most of our clients are in the Western Cape, but SETA submissions are national and largely run through online portals. We work with employers elsewhere in South Africa, including companies with several sites reporting into one submission.
Insights
Plain explanations of the rules that decide whether your levy comes back.
The threshold, the deadline, the documents, and the money that quietly disappears on 1 May.
Read itWhere your 1% goes once SARS collects it, and the two very different routes it can take back to you.
Read itWhy two companies can spend the same amount on training and score fifteen points apart.
Read itIf you would rather set out the situation properly than talk it through, this is the form for that. Tell us the size of the business, who you are registered with, and what is worrying you.
Based in
Cape Town, Western Cape
Working across
South Africa
