The Covid-19 Temporary Employee / Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) is a special benefit created under the Unemployment Insurance Fund to assist employers who are not able to pay their staff as a consequence of the lockdown.
To be able to apply for the relief the following qualifying criteria needed to be met:-
- You must be registered with the UIF;
- You must comply with the application procedure for the financial relief scheme;
- The closure of your business must be directly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The starting point and is to have your UIF registration number. This is not your SARS UIF number – but the number that was issued by the Unemployment Insurance Fund.
You are also going to need your latest statement from your bank or a letter from your bank confirming your banking details.
Log onto https://uifecc.labour.gov.za/covid19/covid19 and click on register.
You are also going to need your latest statement from your bank or a letter from your bank confirming your banking details.
Click on Register and fill in the required details and click on Proceed.
Once you have registered you are ready to go. But how…. If you click documents, you can download a sample txt document but in all honesty if you don’t know what columns are for what… BREATHE! I emailed the [email protected] and the full documents were sent to me, it took about a day. If you want to contact us directly and I will forward the email I received – hopefully a little quicker! You need to have this excel format to complete which you will then save as a .csv file to be able to upload.
Ok so you have registered – now what?
What I found is that that you need to have your employee information .csv completed and ready to upload as well as your latest bank statement or bank letter ready to upload.
The template supplied by UIF needs to be completed in Excel and then saved as a .csv file.
Now you need to go back to the TERS website and login.
You will need to complete all the fields on the Capture Entity Details and proceed. The following screen that opens is a Memorandum of Agreement between UIF & an Employer (MOA). As long as you have less than 10 employees you can continue. Should you have more then 10 employees I have not tested the online upload function, as my focus has been on small business so far.
Read through the MOA and at the bottom of the page you can accept and continue.
The next page that pops up is the Legal Undertaking form A4.
Please read the Legal Undertaking and at the bottom of the screen you will accept.
You will then have a screen that asks for Employee details – this is where you will upload your bank statement or letter as well as the employee csv files. You will need to click on Download Files to be able to continue.
You will need to click Yes to the question if you would like to upload the csv file. The first document you will upload is the bank statement / bank letter. It is as simple as selecting the upload button. The next button is to upload the CSV file and will then submit the documents.
I then received a screen with green writing – SUCCESS! At this stage I am still waiting for my email from UIF – but it has only been a few hours. If anything changes or needs to be updated I will update this post.
In the meantime, should you need any assistance if you are completely stuck or if you just don’t want to do this… Please contact me and I will happily assist you.
