PAIA Manual

What this manual is

This manual is published under section 51 of the Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000. It says what records Burtronix CC (registration number 1996/045193/23) holds, which of them you can have without asking formally, and how to request the rest.

Burtronix CC is a private body for the purposes of that Act. It is a close corporation that builds and hosts websites, and it publishes Stage Africa. This manual covers the company and everything it does, rather than any one of those.

Where this manual describes what we do with personal information, the privacy notice for whichever of our websites you are using says the same thing at greater length.

Who to contact

The Information Officer for Burtronix CC is Andries Petrus (Riaan) Burger.

  • Telephone: +27 82 657 6005. It is the only number the company has, and it is a mobile.
  • Email: privacy@burtronix.com
  • Fax: none. The company does not have one.
  • Street address: 108 5th Street, Linden, Randburg.
  • Postal address: the same. The company has no separate post box.

There is no deputy information officer, and there cannot be one. The Information Officer is the only person in the company who carries these duties, so requests come to him and are answered by him.

You may also contact, or complain to, the Information Regulator (South Africa):

The Regulator's guide to this Act

The Information Regulator publishes a guide on how to use this Act. It explains what the Act is for, how to make a request to a public or a private body, what help you can expect from an information officer and from the Regulator, and what you can do if a request is refused.

You can get the guide from the Regulator at inforegulator.org.za, or by asking the Regulator for it. The Regulator makes it available in each of the official languages and in braille.

We do not keep printed copies. The company has no public office, so there is nowhere to come and read one.

Records you can have without asking

These are on our websites and you do not have to request them:

  • This manual, at burtronix.co.za.
  • The privacy notice for burtronix.co.za, on the same site.
  • Stage Africa's privacy notice, its terms of use, and its corrections policy, at stage.africa.

Everything else we hold requires a request under this Act, and the section below says how to make one.

Records available under other laws

Some of what concerns the company is held by somebody else under another law, and a request for it goes to them rather than to us:

  • The company's registration, its founding statement, its members, and its annual returns, under the Close Corporations Act, 1984 and the Companies Act, 2008. The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission keeps these.
  • Tax records, under the Tax Administration Act, 2011. We keep our copies for five years, as that Act requires.
  • Employment records, under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, 1997. That Act requires an employer to record each employee's name, occupation, hours worked and pay, and to keep the record for three years from its last entry.

What we hold records about

The subjects on which we hold records, and what we hold on each:

  • The company itself. Founding and registration records, member records, annual returns, and correspondence with the Commission.
  • Money. Quotations and invoices, statements, bank records, tax returns and assessments, and the supporting records the Revenue Service requires.
  • Employees. Employment contracts, personal and contact details, identity and tax reference numbers, banking details so that they can be paid, payroll and leave records, and the correspondence that goes with employing somebody. These are held in a private repository the Information Officer controls.
  • Clients. Contracts and quotations, project correspondence, specifications, and the operational records that go with building or hosting a website for somebody else.
  • Suppliers. Contracts and terms with the companies whose services we use, including our host, our registrar, and Google.
  • What we build and publish. Source code, designs, editorial material, and the licence records that go with published photographs and articles.
  • People who use our websites. Analytics information, web server logs, and correspondence, all of it as the privacy notice for that site describes.

Where we host or operate a website for a client, the personal information that site holds is the client's rather than ours. We hold it as their operator, and a request for it should go to them, because it is theirs to grant or to refuse.

How to ask for a record

Use the prescribed form. Form 2 of the PAIA Regulations is the form for a request to a private body, and the Regulator publishes it. Send the completed form to the Information Officer, at the address above.

Your request must give us enough detail to find the record, tell us who you are and how to reach you, and say in what form you want the record. It must also say which right you are seeking to exercise or protect, and why you need the record for it. That last requirement is section 50 of the Act and it applies to private bodies specifically: we may give you a record only where you need it to exercise or protect a right.

We must require you to pay the prescribed request fee before we process the request. That is section 54(1) and it is not something we may waive, including where you are asking for information about yourself. The request fee is R140. If we grant the request there is a further access fee for searching, preparing and reproducing the record, at the rates the Regulations set, and we may ask for a deposit first where the work is substantial. We may not charge you anything the Regulations do not set.

We answer within 30 days of receiving the request. We may extend that once, by a further 30 days, and we will tell you if we do and why. If we refuse we will tell you the reasons and what you can do about it.

A private body has no internal appeal, so if you are unhappy with our decision your remedies are a complaint to the Information Regulator, which must be lodged within 180 days, or an application to court.

What we do with personal information

This part sets out how Burtronix CC processes personal information, which section 51 requires a manual to describe.

Why we process it. To run the company: to employ people and pay them, to quote for work and do it, to invoice and be paid, to buy the services we use, to run and secure the websites we publish, to understand how those websites are used, to answer people who write to us, to publish Stage Africa, and to keep the records the law requires.

Whose information we hold, and what:

  • Our employees. Employment contracts, personal and contact details, identity and tax reference numbers, banking details, and payroll and leave records.
  • Clients, and the people who work for them. Names, roles, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the correspondence that goes with a project.
  • Suppliers, and the people who work for them. The same categories.
  • People who visit our websites. Analytics information, the technical information a browser sends, and whatever is sent to a published address.
  • People who subscribe to Stage Africa's newsletter. An email address, and the record of their confirmation.
  • People written about in Stage Africa. What a published article or directory entry says about them, compiled from public sources.

Who receives it:

  • Google, as our operator. Google Analytics and Google BigQuery hold the analytics for our websites, and Google Workspace carries our email.
  • Xneelo, as our operator. The South African company whose servers our websites run on.
  • GitLab, as our operator. Our private repositories are stored there, including the one holding employment records.
  • Our accountants, the South African Revenue Service and the Unemployment Insurance Fund, for what tax and employment law require, along with any benefit fund the company contributes to on an employee's behalf.
  • Anybody the law requires us to give it to, and anybody it is necessary to give it to in order to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

Where it goes across a border. Our servers are in South Africa. Our email is in Google Workspace, outside South Africa, and our private repositories, including the one holding employment records, are stored with GitLab, also outside South Africa. Google Analytics processes in the United States, and a daily export of the analytics for burtronix.co.za and for stage.africa goes to Google BigQuery datasets held in the United States. We make those transfers under the data processing terms we have with Google.

How we protect it. Access controls, encryption of information in transit, and giving the people who operate our systems only the access they need.

Where to get this manual

This manual is available:

  • On burtronix.co.za, free.
  • To the Information Regulator, on request.
  • To anybody else on request, against the fee the Regulations set for a copy of a manual, charged per A4 page.

We have no public office, so there is nowhere to come and inspect a printed copy. Ask us and we will send it.

Keeping this manual current

We update this manual whenever what it describes changes: a new category of record, a new recipient, a change in where information goes, or a change in who the Information Officer is.

Each version carries its own version number and the date it took effect, and the version it replaced stays available.

Version 1.0, effective 5 August 2026.

© 2026 Burtronix · Johannesburg, South Africa