Meet the #AbsaSmallBizFriday Featured Business of the week – InfoDocs.
InfoDocs helps business owners and professionals by making it as easy as possible to manage annual returns, shareholders and beneficial owners. It does this by integrating with CIPC to provide a company dashboard with all of your company, director and shareholder information and documents, including over 70+ templates such as minutes, resolutions, consent letters, share certificates, company registers and more.
Joshua Alexandre dropped out of university and moved home to the small town of Port Alfred to build InfoDocs when he was 21 years old. The idea was inspired by his father who had started a company of his own and needed help with his CIPC compliance. Joshua searched for a solution and realised there wasn’t a simple and easy way for business owners to manage their company records and that the only solutions for professionals (accountants, lawyers, company secretaries etc.) were expensive, complicated and outdated.
So he wrote a business plan and began to learn everything he could about company secretarial requirements. A developer and Joshua began building the app and pitched it to over 100 business owners, refining the product with every demo. Soon, they learned it was mostly accountants who did the company’s secretarial work and worked with them to rapidly expand into the market.
Ultimately, it took InfoDocs one year to reach 43 companies, two years to reach 866, three to reach 5,507, four to reach 16,499, five to reach 28,397, six to reach 57,209 and they are now on track to reach 100,000 companies by the end of year 7. To this day, Joshua believes that by making it as easy as possible to register and maintain a company, InfoDocs would be empowering entrepreneurs to do what they do best – build their businesses.
InfoDoc’s greatest success was helping business owners navigate the introduction of beneficial ownership. When South Africa was greylisted, the government introduced new laws to require business owners to file their beneficial ownership information with the CIPC, adding to the already difficult job of maintaining a registered company. They worked tirelessly to adapt to the new laws and successfully launched a solution within the first month. This included the ability to easily add and create a register of beneficial owners, a disclosure or beneficial ownership diagram, and the option to file this information to CIPC for less than R250 (or for free for subscription customers). This was a perfectly timed solution to a problem still experienced by many business owners to this day.
This journey has taught Joshua Alexandre to have huge respect for business owners and the professionals who serve them. The sheer diversity of businesses on their platform and the value they provide both to their own customers and the teams that run them is endlessly inspiring and makes him excited to go to work every day.
InfoDocs has every type of South African you can imagine from farmers in the Karoo to construction workers in Gauteng, from butchers in the Eastern Cape to brewers in Cape Town. By the grace of God, they are at these businesses’ service. Alex believes InfoDocs will continue to grow so long as they remember who they serve and continue to work tirelessly for their benefit. They hoped to reach 100,000 companies by the end of 2024 and to spread to even greater heights in the years to come.
In 2024, InfoDocs was one of the Top 20 award winners at the South African Small Business Awards – this prestigious awards programme celebrates the most outstanding businesses and the exceptional business people behind these successful and growing businesses.
We hope to see Joshua Alexandre and his team at InfoDocs continue to flourish in their industry.
The Small Business Friday Movement, sponsored by Absa, encourages all South Africans to go out there and support local small businesses. It’s a 365 day drive that peaks on the first Friday of Spring every year. Find out more about #AbsaSmallBizFriday here and read about more of our featured small business heroes here.