For non-profits

Why the records matter

An NPO has to be able to show what it did and that it was properly governed. Attendance registers and meeting records are the ordinary evidence of both: that the activities happened, that the committee met, that decisions were taken by people who were in the room.

In most choirs these records exist, but as a book at the door, a photograph of a signed page, or somebody's memory. That is exactly the state they are in when a report is due or a funder asks a question.

AtChoir keeps them as they are made. Every scan is stored, dated, and recorded against the event and the member. Attendance for any event can be read back afterwards.

Committee and management meetings

A committee meeting works the same way a rehearsal does. Create it in the calendar as a meeting, let members scan in, and the record is kept alongside everything else. Meeting is a kind of event in its own right, so a year of committee minutes does not have to be sifted out of the rehearsal history later.

The result is a single, continuous record of who attended what — rehearsals, performances, committee meetings, annual general meetings — held in one place instead of four.

Annual reporting — planned, not available

We intend to help NPOs assemble the attendance and activity information they need for their annual report to the Department of Social Development, drawing on the records the choir has already made during the year.

This is planned. It does not exist yet. Nothing on this page should be read as a feature you can use today.

Two things it will not do, even once it is built. It will not prepare financial statements — that is your treasurer's and your accountant's work, and AtChoir holds no financial records. And it will not make you compliant: what you submit, when you submit it, and whether it satisfies the Department remain the organisation's own responsibility. What AtChoir can do is make sure the underlying records are there and are accurate.

Your members' information stays yours

Under POPIA, the choir is the responsible party for its members' personal information. SJL Consulting is the choir's operator: we process that information on the choir's instructions and for no other purpose.

SJL Consulting is responsible party only for its own billing records and its own technical telemetry. That telemetry records the method and a normalised route — never names, email addresses, message content or free text.

The app holds a display name, an email address, an optional voice part, a role, and the choir's attendance and task records. It does not hold a date of birth or an age, and it has no field marking anyone as a child. It is built to the standard a child deserves, for everyone, so it never needs to ask.

Where a choir has members under 18, consent is handled as a single attestation by the director at choir level, not as forty separate in-app consents from forty children.

Production data is stored under EU jurisdiction. There is no African region available for this datastore, so EU was chosen deliberately and is held in place contractually, which is what section 72 of POPIA requires for a cross-border transfer.

Sign-in tokens are kept in the device's own keychain or keystore. Only hashes of those tokens are ever stored on our side.

Talk to us

If your choir is a registered NPO and you want to see whether this fits, write to info@sjl-consulting.co.za. Tell us the choir's name, your NPO number if you have one to hand, and roughly how many members you have.

AtChoir is a product of SJL Consulting (Pty) Ltd, registration 2019/210092/07, 14 Leonor, Dundas Street, Strand, 7140.