The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) says it is encouraged with the response to its new look and online transaction website.

The new website was launched on 17 September, and the commission says it has received both positive and negative feedback.

“This is a new website and a number of enquiries are attributable to clients being new to the site. However, there have also been some system challenges and CIPC has worked around the clock to sort out any problems,” said the commission in a statement on Monday.

The website has introduced new online transacting services, including a new company registration system, a new name reservation system, a new director and member change system and new systems for company and close corporation address and financial year-end changes.

A large volume of transactions has been received by the CIPC. The CIPC received 11 758 company registrations; 2 637 address changes; 23 668 annual returns; 421 financial year-end changes and 8 406 name reservations.

The CIPC implemented a query logging system with its new website. To date, the CIPC has received close to 2 000 queries on the new system, for which tickets have been issued.

The full turnaround time for these queries, including escalation, is ten working days.

To date, 10% of the queries have been solved. The CIPC said some clients are logging the same query several times, which creates bottlenecks. It urged the public to log each query only once.

“The CIPC acknowledges that there appear to be problems with slow response times on director changes and company registration,” said CIPC.

To deal with this, the CIPC has put in place a number of changes over the past two weeks, including increasing the bandwidth that it has and most recently, increasing the storage and memory on its infrastructure.

The CIPC also acknowledged that there have been problems with the allocation of funds to customer accounts, which has constrained clients, and notably intermediaries, from transacting on the website.

A system change was effected on 23 September 2014, which affected the automated allocation. The problem has since been corrected.