We are a South African company. We process personal information in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). For POPIA purposes, we are the “responsible party” for the information we collect about our own clients. We are an “operator” for the limited information we handle on an employer’s behalf when delivering payslips by WhatsApp.

Our Information Officer can be reached by sending us a message using the contact form.

We keep only three kinds of information. The first is what we need to invoice you and manage your licence or subscription. The second is the licence activation data our licensing provider needs to enforce hardware-locked licences. The third, if you use WhatsApp payslip delivery, is the limited technical data needed to connect your WhatsApp Business Account and report message delivery. We do not collect your financial or banking information, and we do not sell personal information. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not track how you use the software beyond counting employees to enforce licence limits.

Intercode Payroll stores your employer details and your employees’ payroll information in a database on your computer or network server. You, as the employer, are the responsible party for that information under POPIA. Intercode does not collect, access, back up or process it.

If you send us a copy of your database or give us remote access to your computer for support, we use that database copy or computer access only to resolve your support request. We delete any database copies sent to us immediately upon closing the request.

Some optional features connect Intercode Payroll directly to services you choose, such as your email server or Microsoft 365, Gmail, Microsoft OneDrive, your accounting software, and the SARS eFiling or Easy-File platforms. Those connections run from your computer to the service concerned – they do not pass through Intercode. Where applicable, credentials for these services are stored encrypted on your computer using Windows data protection.

Intercode Payroll lets employers send payslips to their employees by WhatsApp. Intercode is a Meta Tech Provider, and the feature uses Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform (Cloud API). Using it is optional.

Connecting your WhatsApp Business Account. You connect your account through Meta’s Embedded Signup, launched from a page on intercode.co.za. During this process you log in to Meta and grant Intercode’s app permission to manage messaging on your WhatsApp Business Account. Meta then gives us an authorisation code, your WhatsApp Business Account ID, your phone number ID and your business portfolio ID.

Our server-side service, hosted on Cloudflare, exchanges the authorisation code for an access token. It also completes the setup steps Meta requires, such as subscribing our app to your account’s notifications and registering your phone number. The access token and account IDs are passed to your Intercode Payroll installation and stored encrypted on your computer. Intercode does not retain the access token on its servers. We use this information only to send messages on your instructions and to maintain the connection.

Sending payslips. Payslips are sent directly from your computer to Meta’s WhatsApp Cloud API. A message contains the employee’s mobile number, name and payslip document. Payslip content does not pass through or get stored on Intercode’s servers.

Delivery notifications. Meta sends notifications about your messages to Intercode’s webhook service. These include delivery and read statuses, message IDs, timestamps and the recipient’s mobile number. If an employee replies, the reply is included too. We hold status notifications only until your Intercode Payroll installation retrieves them. We do not store the content of employee replies – they are discarded. We use this information only to show you whether payslips were delivered.

What we do not do. We do not use information obtained through Meta’s platform for advertising, marketing or profiling. We do not sell it, share it with data brokers or use it to train artificial-intelligence models. We use it only to provide the WhatsApp payslip feature to the employer who connected the account.

Roles. The employer is the responsible party for employee information sent by WhatsApp. The employer must ensure it has a lawful basis to send payslips to employees this way and has any opt-in Meta requires. For this feature, Intercode acts as the employer’s operator. Meta’s handling of WhatsApp messages is governed by the WhatsApp Business terms and Meta’s privacy policy.

Disconnecting. You can disconnect at any time by removing Intercode’s access in your Meta Business settings. When you disconnect, we delete any WhatsApp-related information we hold for your account, as described in section 9.

We share personal information only with the service providers needed to run our business and services. Each is bound to protect it. They are:

• Cryptlex, for licence management.
• Meta Platforms, for WhatsApp delivery, as instructed by the employer.
• Cloudflare, which hosts our webhook and token-exchange service.
• Xneelo, which hoists our website.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, for example to SARS. We do not sell or rent personal information.

Under POPIA you may ask whether we hold personal information about you and request access to it. You may ask us to correct or delete it, object to its processing, and withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.

To request deletion of your data, please send us a message using our contact form with the subject line “Data deletion request”. Please include your business name and customer account number.

We will confirm your identity and respond within 7 days. Where applicable, we will:

• delete your client record from our licensing and support systems;
• ask Cryptlex to delete your licence activation records, which deactivates the licence;
• delete any WhatsApp Business Account information, access tokens and delivery notifications we hold.

We may need to keep invoices and related accounting records for as long as South African tax and company law requires, which is generally five to seven years.

If you connected WhatsApp through Meta, you can also remove Intercode’s access in your Meta Business settings.

If you are an employee of an employer that uses Intercode Payroll, your payroll information is held by your employer, not by Intercode. Please direct requests about it to your employer.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle your request, you may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa) at https://inforegulator.org.za.