The CFO Companion

One risk you are already carrying. One cost you cannot justify. Kairos answers both.

Unapproved AI is already inside most finance functions, with no record of what left the business. A senior finance professional costs upward of R900,000 a year. Kairos connects directly to your accounting system, runs on contracted enterprise AI that never trains on your books and never retains them, and delivers the analysis a senior finance professional would produce — continuously, and on the record.

Start with a free diagnostic See what it replaces
Authorised, contained, recordedEvery query attributed to a named user and logged.
Contracted enterprise AINo consumer tools. No training. No retention.
Built for SA governancePOPIA, King IV, Companies Act s76.
Where you are today

One risk you're already carrying. One cost you can't justify.

The choice is not whether AI enters your finance function. It is already there. The choice is whether it arrives governed, or continues to arrive through whatever tab happens to be open.

The risk

Unapproved AI, already in your finance function

No policy. No record. No oversight.
  • Someone is pasting ledger extracts, debtor lists and payroll into whatever tool is open
  • No record of what left the business, when, or to where — nothing to show an auditor
  • POPIA accountability sits with the business, not with the person who pasted it
  • King IV Principle 12 asks the board to govern technology; it cannot govern what it cannot see
  • The output reaches management accounts with no provenance and nobody able to explain it
The answer

Kairos

A defined annual cost, well below the alternative.
  • One authorised, read-only connection to your ledger — it cannot post, edit or delete
  • Contracted enterprise AI: no consumer products, no training on your books, no retention
  • Every query authorised, attributed to a named user and logged
  • Every figure carries its source and its data-quality status
  • Permanent institutional memory across every entity and every period
  • Continuity does not depend on any one person staying
The cost

Hire a senior finance professional

R900K – R2.5M / year, fully loaded
  • Three to six months to recruit, another three to six to reach productivity
  • The knowledge sits with one person, and leaves when they do
  • One person's capacity, across a function that needs more than one person's attention
  • Hard to justify at R100M revenue, even though the work is genuinely needed
  • Even fractional cover runs R75K – R150K a month, with continuity subject to their other clients
The challenge

You already know the symptoms.

None of this is a technology problem. It is a capacity problem that technology has, until now, been unable to touch — because the tools that could help were never allowed near the data.

Variance commentary is rushed

Month-end closes leave no room for the analysis the board actually asks for.

Strategic finance isn't happening

Cash forecasts, scenarios, covenant monitoring — there is simply no capacity for any of it.

The FM is doing the work of three

Burnout risk, a single point of failure, and no leverage on the team you already pay for.

A senior CFO is unaffordable

R1.5M – R2.5M fully loaded. The wrong fit for a R100M business that still needs the thinking.

The Kairos answer

AI-grade finance intelligence. Your data, your control.

An AI-powered CFO Companion built for finance. It connects directly to your accounting system, runs on contracted enterprise AI infrastructure that never trains on your books and never retains them, and delivers the analysis a senior finance professional would produce.

Specialised

Built on financial reasoning, accounting standards and governance frameworks, rather than a general-purpose assistant pointed at finance.

Governed

Every query is authorised, attributed to a named user and logged. Contracted enterprise AI — no consumer tools, no model training, no retention.

Compliant

POPIA-compliant by design. King IV-aligned outputs. Companies Act s76 support for informed director reliance.

What is hard to copy

Why this is difficult to replicate.

It is a fair question why a competitor could not assemble something similar. The answer is that the difficult parts of Kairos are the parts that cannot be shortcut: the governance posture, the jurisdiction, the ledger boundary, and the context that accumulates over time.

01

Governed by architecture, not by policy

An acceptable-use policy asks people not to paste the debtors list somewhere. Kairos removes the reason to. Authorisation, attribution and logging are properties of the system rather than rules written down and hoped for — and the AI layer runs under a contracted enterprise agreement with no training and no retention. A product built the other way around cannot be talked into this shape.

02

Mixed-ledger consolidation your vendor will not build

A group running a Xero entity, a Sage entity and a QuickBooks entity currently ties them together in a spreadsheet that nobody trusts. No accounting vendor will fix this, because building it means acknowledging that their own customers run rivals' software. That constraint is structural, it is not going to change, and it is where Kairos does the one thing they cannot.

03

South African statutory depth, encoded

VAT201 and EMP201 reconciliation, IFRS for SMEs presentation, exchange control awareness, B-BBEE reporting inputs, King IV committee structure, Companies Act section 76. This is not a compliance badge on a marketing page. A global vendor entering this market has to learn a regulatory environment Kairos was designed inside from the start.

04

Financial reasoning, engineered

Kairos does not answer finance questions by being generally capable. It reasons within accounting standards, governance frameworks and the logic of a trial balance — the difference between a system that produces a plausible paragraph and one that can defend a number.

05

Memory that compounds

Every flag raised, every recommendation given and every response recorded is held in the commentary ledger — accepted, rejected with a reason, or marked as acted upon. Kairos knows what it raised last year and what happened next. That institutional context grows more useful the longer the system runs, and it is not something a new vendor can arrive holding.

06

Provenance on every figure

Each number carries its source, its data snapshot timestamp and its data-quality status. That is the difference between output you can put in front of a lender, an auditor or a board, and output you have to check line by line before you trust it.

A finance label is easy to add to a general-purpose chatbot. A governed AI boundary, encoded South African statutory depth, consolidation across rival ledgers and accumulated institutional context are considerably harder — and they are what the work actually rests on.
What Kairos does

The work that isn't getting done.

Not the tasks your team already handles. The strategic finance work that falls off the edge of every month-end — the work you would hire for if the numbers allowed it.

Variance analysis at depth

Budget versus actual with root-cause commentary and divisional drill-downs — specific, data-backed explanations of every material movement rather than a restatement of the numbers.

13-week rolling cash forecast

Built from open AR and AP with named debtors, scenario overlays and threshold alerts, rebuilt continuously off live ledger data rather than reconstructed by hand each quarter.

Anomaly detection

Continuous monitoring of unusual journal patterns, COGS movements and debtor concentration across every entity — the review nobody has time to perform manually, running all the time.

Risk flagging

Solvency, liquidity, covenant and concentration risk surfaced before it becomes a loss, with each flag linked to the underlying evidence in the ledger.

Peer benchmarking

Margin, DSO and working capital measured against a de-identified peer set by sector and region. Knowing your gross margin is 31% tells you little; knowing the peer set runs 38% tells you where to look on Monday.

Mixed-ledger consolidation

A Xero entity, a Sage entity and a QuickBooks entity in one view, with entity-level drill-down from every consolidated line and FX translation across the group.

SA statutory reconciliation

VAT201 and EMP201 reconciliation, IFRS for SMEs presentation, exchange control awareness and B-BBEE reporting inputs — management consolidation kept clearly distinct from statutory.

Capex and M&A modelling

DCF, IRR, NPV, payback and sensitivity analysis against your own hurdle rate, with the working shown — and post-investment review of promised versus delivered, permanently.

Commentary ledger

A persistent, exportable audit trail of every flag, recommendation and response — accepted, rejected with a reason, or marked as acted upon. King IV Principle 2, evidenced rather than asserted.

Strategic advisor, always on

Asks the questions a good CFO asks. Drafts lender packs. Explains what a scenario means for covenant headroom — including on the weekend before a board meeting.

How AI is governed here

Authorised, contained, recorded.

Kairos was built around a single principle: every use of AI on your financial data should be authorised, contained and recorded. Here is how that works in practice.

01

One authorised connection, read-only

Kairos connects directly to Xero, Sage, Zoho or QuickBooks. Read-only — it cannot post, edit or delete anything in your ledger. Encrypted in transit, logically isolated per customer. No exports, no spreadsheets in email, no copy-paste.

02

Processing is contained and contracted

Queries run on infrastructure dedicated to your tenant. Analysis uses Anthropic's Claude under an enterprise agreement — never a consumer AI product, never used to train a model, and not retained after the request. That is a contractual position you can put in front of a procurement committee, not a stated preference.

03

Audit trail by design

Every query, every response and every recommendation is logged against a named user and exportable — for your auditor, your POPIA officer or your regulator. You have a standing answer to the question of who has seen your numbers.

The alternative

What this work costs when you hire it.

Kairos is priced against the cost of the capacity it adds, not against a software price list. This is the capacity, and what the market charges for it.

Hiring alternativeAnnual costCovered at
Junior accountant / bookkeeperR280kPulse
FM at capacity, plus overtimeR480kPulse
FP&A analyst (mid-level)R720kFunction
Senior FP&A plus part-time CFOR1.1MFunction
FP&A Manager (senior)R1.2MEnterprise
Part-time CFO (three days a week)R1.45MEnterprise
Full-time senior CFOR2.2MEnterprise
Group CFO plus a two-person FP&A teamR3.5MSovereign
And Kairos does not take leave, does not resign, and remembers every transaction it has ever seen.

Source: South African market data, mid-2026. Annual cost includes salary, benefits (15%), bonus accrual (10%), allocated overheads and recruitment amortisation. Kairos pricing is quoted separately.

Five capability levels

Capability that scales with your finance maturity.

Every level carries the same governance posture — one authorised read-only connection, contracted enterprise AI, and a full audit trail. What changes is scope, context and control.

Start here · Kairos Pulse

One business, one ledger, one user — R995 a month.

Connects read-only to Sage, Xero or Zoho. Ask plain questions about your own figures and get answers where every number carries its source.

See Kairos Pulse →
LEVEL 01

Pulse

One entity, one ledger
The owner-managed business · single user · no finance function
  • Direct connection to Sage, Xero or Zoho
  • Financial pulse: profitability, working capital, cash by account
  • Conversational analysis over your ledger, every figure sourced
  • 13-week rolling cash forecast from open AR and AP
  • Variance to date against prior year, same period
  • A read-only record of what was said, and when
  • R995 per month, excluding VAT
See Kairos Pulse
LEVEL 02

Member

Your numbers, in context
Consortium · franchise · lodge group · accounting practice
  • Everything in Pulse
  • Benchmark standing against a de-identified peer set
  • Margin, DSO and working capital against businesses your size
  • Peer comparison by sector and by region
  • Data quality score with specific fix recommendations
  • Provisioned and supported through your group
Request pricing
LEVEL 03

Function

The whole finance function
An FM plus two to five people · month-end takes a week
  • Everything in Member, for the whole team
  • Role-based permissions — Admin, CFO, Finance Manager, Viewer
  • Your budget imported, with version history
  • Variance against budget with root-cause commentary
  • Live commentary ledger — accept, reject with reason, mark action taken
  • Alerts routed by role, with escalation timers
  • Scenario overlays on the cash forecast
Request pricing
LEVEL 04

Enterprise

Entities on different systems
The group FD or CFO · four to fifteen entities · more than one accounting system
  • Everything in Function, unlimited users and entities
  • A Xero, a Sage and a QuickBooks entity in one view
  • Entity-level drill-down from every consolidated line
  • FX translation across entities
  • VAT201 and EMP201 reconciliation, IFRS for SMEs
  • Covenant monitoring and multi-bank treasury position
  • Management consolidation, distinct from statutory
Request pricing
LEVEL 05

Sovereign

Infrastructure you control
Group CFO · PE · listed · auditor, POPIA officer and sponsor all sign off
  • Everything in Enterprise, plus enterprise-grade controls
  • Single-tenant infrastructure — your own deployment
  • On-premise option, inside your data centre
  • Data residency of your choosing
  • Custom ERP integration — SAP, NetSuite, Oracle, Dynamics
  • SSO and custom roles beyond the four defaults
  • Audit-grade query logging, exportable to a regulator
  • Dedicated success manager and quarterly reviews
Talk to us
Pulse is the floor of the platform, not a trial of it. Each level is priced well below the cost of the capacity it adds.
Governance built in

Built inside the framework you already report against.

Kairos was designed within the South African corporate governance framework. Every output supports — never undermines — the duties of directors and the standards expected of finance professionals.

Companies Act 71 of 2008

Section 76(3)(c) requires care, skill and diligence. Section 76(4) requires directors to become informed before relying on the business judgment rule. Kairos gives directors a continuous, documented basis for doing so.

King IV

Principle 1 (ethical leadership), Principle 5 (reports enabling informed assessment), Principle 11 (risk governance) and Principle 12 (technology governance) — embedded in how Kairos operates, not appended to it.

POPIA

Purpose limitation, data minimisation, encryption, retention controls and no cross-customer data use. Compliant by design rather than by afterthought.

Where to start

See what your finance function looks like with Kairos.

Start with a free diagnostic. No commitment and no procurement process.

STEP 01

52-question maturity assessment

A structured review across five pillars — strategy, risk, governance, controls and reporting. Thirty minutes.

STEP 02

Your scored report

Pillar-by-pillar diagnosis with specific recommendations mapped directly to Kairos capabilities.

STEP 03

30-day evaluation on your own month-end

Under our standard evaluation agreement. Connect Kairos to your accounting system, use it through a real month-end, then decide.

We reply within one business day. We do not add you to a mailing list and we do not share your details. Prefer email? Write to sfourie@kairosintel.co.za.

sfourie@kairosintel.co.za +27 76 545 2494 www.kairosintel.co.za