This plan is about capacity.

Every application costs a consultant's attention. That attention is your ceiling. The work so far has been moving what lives in Riekus's head, and Claire's, and Brandon-Lee's, into something that runs on every file at once and does not get tired at four in the afternoon.

Two things happened in your own files while I was doing it. A renewal was refused while complying with the rule as the Department publishes it (section 02). And an appeal letter left your office citing section 19(2) on an 11(1) matter; Riekus confirmed the slip the same week, and the appeal is lodged. It is exactly what Rayne described in the first meeting:

Neither was carelessness. Both were caught by a person reading closely, which is what does not scale. From Stage 2, every letter has its citations checked against the route before it can be released.

A renewal expired on 31 August. The pack was lodged on 1 July, sixty-one days ahead. The published wording says no less than 60 days prior, so the last safe day was 2 July. It was refused under Regulation 9(8)(c): the Department counted two calendar months back from expiry, which lands on 30 June. Both readings were true at once.

So every renewal is scored against both readings, the earlier governs, and the handler sees both dates. On top sits your own margin, because neither of you lodges on the last legal day. Rayne works to a day or two early and Riekus to a day early, so the system holds the larger of the two:

The warning comes on your day, not the Department's last lawful one. The statutory date is never overwritten.

One stage at a time, each tested before the next begins, working back from completion in December 2026. The test that decides each stage is finished was written before the work started.

How you sign off a stage. You watch a short recording of it running on your own kind of case, you see the list of requirements it clears with the test behind each one, and you tick agree or disagree per line. The instalment follows your ticks.

If one of these arrives late, the date moves.

What I have assumed. Say so if any of these is wrong. Outbound visas are out of scope. Consultants do case work on laptops; the client portal is built for phones. Existing matters stay in your current process until you approve a move. Your templates stay yours. English only.

Separate parts, each doing one job and each tested on its own.

Two decisions a technical reviewer asks about first. The pages are built on the server and sent finished, because the job is forms, tables and queues, and one codebase is easier to secure and to hand on. And documents are generated when somebody needs one, from the audited record, rather than stored twice. A submission record keeps what actually went to the Department and what came back.

There is no Departmental interface, and any supplier who tells you otherwise is guessing. Qualification verification has none either, which is why that part is a countdown you can see rather than an integration nobody can have.

Your clients are Kellogg, KLM, Air France, Huawei, Tata, TCS, Infosys and Mediclinic. Their procurement teams send a questionnaire. These are the answers.

• Nothing reaches storage unscanned. Uploads are scanned before they are stored, and a file that fails is refused. This is designed and is built before any live file moves.
• Nothing is silently replaced. A stored file is versioned and never overwritten, so there is always a record of what your client actually sent.
• Encrypted at rest, with the keys in your own cloud account's key service, never in the application's settings. Key rotation sits with a named person at your end.
• Each client sees only its own people. That is enforced where the data is fetched, not by hiding buttons, and it is already built and tested.
• Live data sits in Google Cloud's Johannesburg region, as our agreement intends for live operation.
• A restore is performed and timed before any live file moves, with the recovery point and time proposed as numbers for the commercial agreement.
• If something goes wrong, you are told by name and by phone without delay, and within 72 hours at most, as our agreement sets.
• One person builds this. The design document, runbooks written before go-live, and a repository whose checks already run on every change are what let somebody else pick it up.

Small changes are free. Anything under half a day I absorb. Bigger ones get one page within three working days: what it adds, what it moves, what it costs. Nothing is built or invoiced until you have said yes in writing, and everything agreed goes in a log that sits with the agreement.

Your live files do not move until you have approved how, and there is a way back to your current process that works the same afternoon.

Data protection is your attorney's position, not mine. Passport scans, medical reports and qualification records are special personal information. Your attorney sets the position and I build to it.

Where AI sits. The platform's judgement is rule-based and stays that way; that is what makes it defensible. Later, an assistance layer can remove typing, such as reading a passport for a person to confirm. It never writes a date, a score or a section of the Act, and nothing about your applicants leaves South Africa. None of it is in this price or switched on until it is proven on your own cases.

Out of scope: automating the submission itself, the qualification portal, outbound visas, and the forecasting in section 09.

Your volumes and your fees, as you gave them to me.

You told me Mobility handles 20 to 40 applications a month and Solutions 10 to 15. Your fee card runs from R1,000 for police-clearance assistance to R15,000 for permanent residence, with core work visas at R10,500.

The gain is not people working faster. It is the ceiling moving. Today the number of applications you can carry is set by how many one consultant can hold in their head, which is why an influx hurts and a holiday hurts. Move the deadlines, the scoring and the checks out of memory and the same team carries more. How much more is measured on your own cases once Stage 1 is running, not a number I put in front of you now.

No licence fee and no charge per seat. It runs in your own cloud account; you see the bill. Those costs are the floor for one environment, so a second one, an airline running its own for example, carries its own floor. A penetration test before go-live is yours, and not marked up.

My fee and the per-application arrangement are not in this document. They belong in the commercial agreement, which follows your sign-off on the scope in section 03.

The firms you compete with, and the software they run on, can tell a client where a case is. None that I have seen can say what goes wrong in the next six months, because none owns the rules. You would.

That opens a second phase, priced separately and not in this build: forecasting for your corporate clients. Each assignee's remaining 180-day allowance, the next application in a person's chain surfaced early, and which planned hires would be refused as packaged, with the lever for each.

And when you say you would give it to your customers, there are two versions. An airline's mobility team signing in to your platform and seeing only their own people is already in Stage 3. An airline running its own branded instance is a separate project with its own fee, and the build keeps that cheap.