Twice this month an executive director has asked me the same question: our donors are suddenly asking whether our Section 18A receipts are valid. Why now? The short answer is that the rules changed on 1 March 2026, the enforcement climate changed with them, and your donors' accountants noticed before you did. The longer answer is this article, written for founders and directors rather than practitioners, because the practitioners already know.
Why your donors are suddenly asking
A Section 18A receipt is not a thank you note. It is a tax instrument: the document that lets your donor deduct the donation from their taxable income. When SARS tightens what a valid receipt must contain, an invalid receipt becomes the donor's problem at filing season, and a donor whose deduction is questioned does not write to SARS. They write to you, or worse, they quietly stop giving. In a year when South Africa has exited the FATF greylist on the strength of tighter oversight, and when the Department of Social Development has deregistered thousands of organizations for unfiled reports, nobody in the giving chain is relaxed about paperwork anymore. If you are still establishing your organization or your 18A status, start with our full guide to registering and running an NPO in South Africa, then come back to this one.
What changed on 1 March 2026
The receipt itself now carries a heavier burden, under SARS Public Notice 6762 of October 2025, effective 1 March 2026. Every Section 18A receipt issued from that date must carry a unique receipt number, issued in sequence, so a receipt can be traced and cannot be duplicated. It must identify the donor properly, including the donor's identity number for an individual or registration number for a company or trust, together with contact details, not just a name scrawled above an amount. And where the donation is in kind, goods rather than money, the receipt must describe the property and state its value, because SARS has an entire ruling on how donations of property in kind must appear. A receipt book from the stationery shop, filled in by hand and stored in a drawer, can no longer reliably meet these requirements once your donation volume is more than occasional.
The other half nobody mentions: IT3(d)
Here is the part most organizations only discover when their accountant raises it. The receipt in your donor's hands is no longer the end of your obligation. Organizations approved for Section 18A must also submit the details of the receipts they issue directly to SARS as third party data, in a submission called the IT3(d). It runs twice a year: an annual submission by 31 May covering receipts issued from March to the end of February, and an interim submission by 31 October covering March to August. Two details catch people out. First, SARS matches what you submit against what your donors claim, which is exactly why sloppy receipts surface as donor complaints. Second, the submission is required even if you issued no receipts at all: a nil declaration is still a declaration, and skipping it is itself non compliance.
The threshold where manual stops working
There is a pattern practitioners across the sector will recognize. An organization receiving a handful of donations a year can manage receipting by hand with care and a good register. Somewhere around fifty donations a year, the manual approach stops being a discipline and starts being a risk: numbers get duplicated, donor details get captured half complete, the in kind valuations live in someone's memory, and when IT3(d) season arrives, the reconstruction takes days it should take minutes. The organizations that struggle are rarely careless. They are running yesterday's system against today's rules.
Five moves to make this quarter
First, start a proper receipt register today if you do not have one: every receipt numbered in sequence, every field captured at the moment of donation, never reconstructed later. Second, update what you collect from donors at the point of giving, identity or registration number and contact details included, because you cannot issue a compliant receipt from a first name and an EFT reference. Third, put a valuation practice in place for donations in kind, who values, on what basis, recorded where. Fourth, put both IT3(d) dates on the organization's calendar now, 31 May and 31 October, with the nil declaration rule written next to them. Fifth, talk to your accountant before the season rather than during it, and ask one specific question: are our receipts and our register ready for the new requirements as they stand.
Where we fit, and where your accountant fits
The honest split, same as always. Your accountant is your compliance authority: they confirm your 18A standing, review your receipts against the current requirements, and handle the SARS relationship. That is their ground and it should stay theirs. Where Alleviate fits is the system underneath: on our platform, donations are captured with the donor details the rules require, receipts for approved organizations carry unique sequential numbers inside a register the system keeps for you, and everything stays structured all year, so when your accountant asks for the season's records, the answer is an organized export rather than an archaeology dig. The organizations that find receipting season calm are not the ones with the fewest donations. They are the ones whose system did the remembering.
If this is the year your organization gets its giving side in order, start with the free NGO Readiness Assessment at readiness.alleviate.org, and if you are earlier in the journey, the full establishment guide walks every step from legal form to your first compliance year. The rules have changed. The organizations that change with them, quietly and early, are the ones whose donors never have a reason to ask.
Lisa Attoh is Regional Director, Africa at Alleviate Technologies. She works with NPO leaders, and with the accountants and advisors who serve them, across Southern Africa.
