UbuntuSoft Indigent Management
Common questions from municipal officials
Straight answers about what UbuntuSoft Indigent Management does, and how it fits your municipality's compliance and finance requirements.
What is UbuntuSoft?
UbuntuSoft is a digital indigent management platform for South African municipalities. It carries an indigent application from capture in the field or at the counter, through verification and assessment, to a municipal decision, service activation and annual renewal — on one record, in one system.
Who can use it?
Local municipalities running their own indigent register, district municipalities supporting several locals, and consultancies or provincial programmes delivering indigent work on a municipality's behalf. Within a municipality there are separate roles for field agents, clerks, supervisors and the finance office — all included, with no per-seat licensing.
Can UbuntuSoft be configured to our indigent policy?
Yes. Your approval process is configured as a workflow — the steps, the income thresholds and who signs off at each gate — so the system follows your council-approved indigent policy rather than a generic template. Workflow authoring is currently done by UbuntuSoft on your instruction; municipal administrators can view their configured workflow at any time.
How long does implementation take?
A municipality can register and be working in the system the same day. A full implementation — migrating your existing register, configuring your policy workflow and training your staff — typically runs over a few weeks, and depends mostly on the state of the register you are bringing across.
Can you migrate our existing indigent database?
Yes. Upload your current register as a spreadsheet or CSV, map your columns to ours, and the system checks every row before anything is written — validating ID numbers, flagging duplicates and returning the rejected rows with reasons so you can fix and re-upload. Nothing lands in your register until you have seen exactly what will happen. You can do this yourself, or we can do it for you as a billable service.
Do you provide training?
Yes, as a billable service: training for field agents, clerks and supervisors, plus a train-the-trainer option so the knowledge stays with the municipality after we leave. See our Services page.
Can UbuntuSoft integrate with our systems?
Yes. Approved households are published to your financial system keyed on the account number your billing system already uses, and stamped with your own mSCOA segments. The same feed reports households that should stop being subsidised. It is available as a scheduled file or over the API, so it works whether or not your finance vendor offers an integration route.
Is there an API?
Yes — a versioned, read-only integration API with a published OpenAPI specification you can hand to your financial system vendor. Access is by an integration key issued by UbuntuSoft at your request, scoped to your municipality alone and revocable at any time. See Integration APIs.
Where is the platform hosted?
In South Africa, on private cloud infrastructure, with encrypted off-site backups for disaster recovery. Each municipality gets its own instance on its own web address. Deployment into your own environment is available where policy requires it.
How is municipal data protected?
Every municipality's register is separated at the database level — no municipality can see another's households. Applicant photographs and documents are held in private storage, never in a publicly readable location. Every capture, check and decision is written to an audit trail recording who did what and when. Staff access can be withdrawn immediately, which signs the person out of any session already open.
Is UbuntuSoft POPIA compliant?
The platform is built to support your POPIA obligations: your municipality is the Responsible Party and UbuntuSoft is the Operator, on a written contract, processing applicant data only on your documented instruction. Consent is captured at the point of collection, data is stored in South Africa, and you can export everything we hold for you at any time. Compliance is ultimately an assessment your own Information Officer makes — we provide the contract, the controls and the records to support it.
How is UbuntuSoft priced?
R189 000.00 per annum for a local municipality, excluding billable services. There is no per-seat licensing and no usage limit — the figure is the same whatever the size of your team or your register. Metros and district municipalities carry much larger registers and are priced differently. See Pricing.
What is included in implementation?
The annual subscription includes your own private instance, hosting and backups, the free Android capture app, your policy workflow configured, reporting, full audit trails, the integration APIs, and bringing your existing register in. Professional services — policy review, register audits, community engagement, field teams, device and connectivity management — are quoted separately, with rate cards available on request. See Services.
What support is provided after go-live?
Support and platform updates are included in the annual subscription — improvements arrive as we build them, with no upgrade to buy the following year. Extended support arrangements, annual re-registration campaigns and audit support are available as billable services. For white-label partners, you support your municipal clients directly and we support you, with escalation paths and response times agreed in writing before go-live.
What is an indigent management system?
An indigent management system is software municipalities use to register, verify and manage subsidies for residents who qualify for free basic services under their indigent policy. UbuntuSoft Indigent Management automates this end-to-end, from registration through to service activation and renewal.
Can UbuntuSoft be used as a white-label solution?
Yes. A white-label deployment carries your organisation’s brand, runs on a domain you control, and can serve many municipalities from one platform with each register kept separate. It suits consultancies, district municipalities and provincial programmes delivering indigent work on municipalities’ behalf. See UbuntuSoft White Label.
How does UbuntuSoft prevent fraudulent and duplicate applications?
Several checks, at different points. Every South African ID number is validated on capture, including its check digit, so a mistyped or invented number is caught immediately. The register is checked for duplicates on ID number, both within an import file and against households already registered. Site inspections attach a field agent’s findings to the household’s record. Applicant information can be verified against approved third-party data sources, and periodic deceased and duplicate sweeps are available as a service to find households that should have come off the register. Every check and decision is recorded against the application, so a query years later is answered from the record.