Terms of use

1. What RUMELA is — and what it is not

RUMELA is a software tool that helps you record, organise, calculate and present your own business information. It includes invoicing, expense capture, bookkeeping records, forecasting, reporting and the rumii AI assistant.

RUMELA is not an accounting firm, auditing firm, tax practice, law firm, financial services provider, credit provider or payment institution. We are:

• not a registered tax practitioner as contemplated in section 240 of the Tax Administration Act, 2011, and not registered with SARS or any recognised controlling body in that capacity;
• not a registered auditor under the Auditing Profession Act, 2005;
• not a professional accountant, accounting officer or independent reviewer;
• not a financial services provider under the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act, 2002, and we give no financial product advice.

Nothing produced by RUMELA or by rumii constitutes tax advice, accounting advice, audit or assurance, legal advice, investment advice or a tax opinion, and no professional relationship of any kind is created between you and us.

2. Tax and SARS — you must consult a registered tax practitioner

Tax figures, VAT calculations, provisional tax estimates, small business corporation treatment, personal service provider treatment, wear-and-tear allowances, tax year apportionments and any other tax-related output in RUMELA are automated, indicative estimates only. They are generated from data you enter, from assumptions built into the software, and from tax rates and thresholds that may be outdated, incomplete or incorrectly applied to your circumstances.

You must have every tax position, return, calculation and submission independently reviewed and approved by a registered tax practitioner or a suitably qualified professional before you rely on it, submit it to SARS, or act on it. You are solely and exclusively responsible for all your SARS registrations, returns, declarations, payments, deadlines and statutory filings (including but not limited to VAT201, EMP201, EMP501, IRP6, ITR12, ITR14 and CIPC filings).

We accept no liability whatsoever for any assessment, penalty, understatement penalty, interest, additional tax, audit, verification, dispute, criminal sanction or other consequence arising from your use of RUMELA, from any calculation it produces, or from any failure, delay or error in it.

3. Accuracy of information and outputs

All outputs — including invoices, statements, management accounts, annual financial statements, trial balances, ledgers, forecasts, health scores, budgets, payroll figures, depreciation schedules and reconciliations — are generated from data you or your team supply and from automated processing. We do not verify, audit, review or independently confirm any of it.

You are responsible for checking every output for accuracy, completeness and suitability before using it, sending it to a third party, or relying on it for any decision. Financial statements produced by RUMELA are unaudited unless a registered professional independently reviews or audits them and issues their own report; labels you apply in the app do not create assurance.

We give no warranty or representation, express or implied, that any output is accurate, complete, current, compliant with IFRS, IFRS for SMEs, the Companies Act, 2008, the Tax Administration Act, 2011, the Value-Added Tax Act, 1991, the Income Tax Act, 1962, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act or any other standard, statute or regulation.

4. AI limitations — rumii is not a financial adviser

rumii is an AI bookkeeping assistant. It is designed to help you organise, summarise and understand your own business information, not to give tailored financial, investment, tax, accounting or legal advice. rumii does not know your full circumstances, objectives or risk tolerance, and it is not authorised or licensed to provide financial advice under South African law.

Any information, suggestion, calculation or explanation provided by rumii is general financial information only, not advice, and must not be relied on without independent professional verification. Always consult a registered professional before making tax, accounting, legal, investment, funding or other financial decisions.

rumii is built on third-party large language models and can be confidently wrong, produce fabricated or outdated information ("hallucinations"), misread documents, or misinterpret your question. Any use you make of AI output is entirely at your own risk.

5. Funding and marketplace information

RUMELA may display information about funding providers, lenders, insurers, factoring companies and similar financial products (the "marketplace"). This information is a static directory only. It is not a recommendation, solicitation, credit application or financial service, and RUMELA does not match you to products based on your personal circumstances.

You must do your own due diligence, read the provider's terms, and consult a suitably qualified professional before entering into any funding, credit or insurance arrangement. RUMELA is not a credit provider, financial intermediary or financial adviser, and receives referral fees from some marketplace partners — never from you.

6. Your account, your data and your team

Keep your credentials confidential and notify us immediately of any suspected misuse. You are responsible for all activity under your account, including that of team members you invite and the permissions you grant them. You retain ownership of the records you load and you are responsible for their accuracy, lawfulness and for having a lawful basis to process any personal information you upload about clients, employees or others. You may export your records at any time and you are responsible for keeping your own backups and for complying with all record-retention obligations applicable to you.

7. Payments, billing and AFS pack

RUMELA is free to use. The only paid product we sell directly is the one-off Annual Financial Statement (AFS) pack. AFS pack purchases are processed by iKhokha on our iKhokha merchant account. By buying an AFS pack you agree to iKhokha's applicable terms and to these terms. Prices are shown in the app in South African Rand (ZAR) and include VAT where applicable.

Separately, where you enable card payment collection from your own clients, the payment is processed by iKhokha on your own iKhokha merchant account. iKhokha deducts 3.7% from the card payment, settles the balance directly to your nominated bank account, and remits an agreed success fee to RUMELA. RUMELA is not a bank, payment services provider, payment facilitator or money transmitter, does not hold client funds in trust, is not a party to the underlying transaction between you and your client, and does not deduct the fee from the payment. Payment links and bank details displayed on your documents are supplied and controlled by you; you are responsible for their correctness. The success fee covers the invoicing, tracking, reconciliation and AI matching service provided by RUMELA. Success fees, transaction fees and pack prices are disclosed in the app and may change on notice. We are not responsible for the acts, omissions, outages, pricing, security or data practices of any third-party provider (including payment providers, bank feed providers, AI model providers, email providers and messaging providers).

8. Intellectual property and licence

RUMELA and everything that makes it up — the software, source code, databases, models, templates, report formats, documentation, designs, the RUMELA and rumii names, logos and all other branding — are and remain the exclusive property of RUMELA TECHNOLOGIES PROPRIETARY LIMITED and its licensors. Nothing in these terms transfers any ownership or intellectual property right in the platform to you.

We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to access and use the service for your own business purposes for as long as your account is in good standing. You may not copy, modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, create derivative works from, resell, sublicense or redistribute any part of the platform, nor remove or obscure any proprietary notice, nor use our branding without our prior written consent.

You retain ownership of the business data and content you upload. You grant us a limited licence to host, process, transmit and display that content solely to provide and support the service to you.

9. Acceptable use

• Do not use the service for unlawful activity, tax evasion, fraud or money laundering.
• Do not present RUMELA output as professionally reviewed, audited or certified when it is not.
• Do not attempt to breach security, reverse engineer, scrape data or disrupt the platform.
• Do not upload malware, unlawful content, or content you have no right to share.
• Do not resell or provide the service to third parties as your own professional service without our written consent.

10. Availability and changes

The service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We do not warrant uninterrupted, error-free or secure operation. Maintenance, third-party outages, connectivity failures and factors beyond our reasonable control may cause downtime or data-processing delays. Features may change, be limited or be withdrawn as the product develops.

11. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law (and subject to any rights you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 that cannot lawfully be excluded), all warranties, conditions and terms implied by law are excluded, and RUMELA, its directors, employees, contractors and suppliers are not liable for any loss or damage of any kind arising from or connected to your use of, or inability to use, the service. This expressly includes:

• tax, penalties, interest, understatement penalties, assessments or SARS disputes;
• incorrect, incomplete, delayed or misleading calculations, reports or AI answers;
• reliance on any output without independent professional verification;
• lost profits, lost revenue, lost savings, lost goodwill, business interruption or reputational harm;
• loss or corruption of data, and unauthorised access caused other than by our gross negligence;
• failures of, or acts and omissions by, third-party providers;
• indirect, incidental, special, punitive or consequential loss, however arising.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the fees you actually paid to RUMELA in that period or ZAR 1 000. You indemnify and hold RUMELA harmless against any third-party claim, penalty, fine or cost arising from your data, your filings, your instructions or your breach of these terms.

12. Ending your use

You may stop using RUMELA at any time. We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms or the law. On closure you may export your records before deletion, subject to the retention periods described in the privacy notice.

13. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa. The parties consent to the jurisdiction of the Durban Magistrate's Court or, where appropriate, the High Court of South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal Local Division, Durban. Should any provision be found unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in full force. These terms constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the service, and may be updated from time to time with notice in the app.