How We Verify Our Guides

Our sourcing, accuracy and correction standards.

Every guide on CluedUp is checked against the official source before we publish it, and we tell you plainly when something needs to be confirmed. Accuracy is the whole point of this site — a wrong step or fee wastes your money and time, and a wrong link can send you to a scam.

Official sources only

We base each guide on the relevant government or regulator website — for example srd.sassa.gov.za and sassa.gov.za (grants), nsfas.org.za (student funding), sars.gov.za and the SARS eFiling portal (tax), dha.gov.za (Home Affairs), and the Department of Basic Education for matric. Every guide lists the official links it relies on, and we link only to official portals — never to “agents” or sites that charge for free services.

We check, and we date

• We verify each step, USSD code, portal address and fee before publishing.
• Fees, grant amounts and timelines change often, so we describe them as “as of the current year — confirm on the official portal,” rather than stating a number as if it were permanent.
• Each guide shows when it was last updated.
• If a detail cannot be reliably verified, we say so instead of guessing.

How our content is produced

Our guides are researched and drafted with the help of AI tools and then checked against primary official sources by our editorial team before publishing. We use AI to organise and speed up research — not to invent facts. Anything we cannot confirm against an official source does not go in.

Safety first

Because scams cluster around exactly these processes, every guide carries a plain warning: do the actual process only on the official site, and never share your ID number, PIN, OTP or password with anyone. See our guide on spotting SASSA and NSFAS scams.

Corrections policy

If we get something wrong, we want to fix it fast. Report it via our contact page; we re-check against the official source and update the guide, noting the update date.