The seven-day rule that catches repair shops out
If you take anything in on trade, buy a machine to fix and resell, or accept a customer's old unit against a new one, the Second-Hand Goods Act applies to you. Most workshops we meet have never been told that. Here is what it actually asks for, in plain language.
There is a moment in most repair shops where someone hands over an old machine and says "just take it off me". Sometimes money changes hands. Sometimes it comes off the price of the new one. Sometimes it is a favour. In all three cases, as far as the law is concerned, you have just dealt in second-hand goods — and a set of obligations switched on that nobody mentioned when you opened.
This is not a scare piece. The Second-Hand Goods Act 6 of 2009 exists for a reasonable purpose: stolen property moves through second-hand trade, and the Act makes that harder by insisting the trade is written down. If your book is honest, the Act is an administrative task. If your book is thin, it is the thing that turns an awkward visit into a serious one.
Who it actually applies to
The Act reaches further than most people assume. It is not only pawn shops and scrapyards. If you buy goods to resell, take trade-ins, or refurbish and sell on — even occasionally, even as a sideline to your main repair work — you are dealing in second-hand goods. A mower workshop that fixes up an old Honda and puts it on the floor with a price on it is dealing. A vape shop that takes a used mod against a new one is dealing.
Pure repair is different. If the machine comes in, gets fixed, and goes back to the same person who brought it, you have not dealt in anything. It is the change of ownership that matters, not the spanner work.
The register: what has to be in it
The Act requires a dealer to keep a register of second-hand goods acquired and disposed of. In practical terms, for every item that comes in, you want to be able to answer six questions without hesitating:
- What is it? A description specific enough to identify that individual item — make, model, colour, and any serial or engine number. "A mower" is not a description. "Honda HRU19 self-propelled, serial GJAA-1234567" is.
- Who did you get it from? Full name, address and identity number, taken off an actual identity document you looked at.
- When? The date it came in.
- What did you pay? The amount, or the value allowed against another purchase.
- Where did it go? Who bought it, when, and for how much.
- Who handled it? Which of your people took it in and which sold it.
Registration as a dealer with SAPS is a separate requirement from the register itself, and whether you need it depends on the nature and scale of your dealing. That is a question for your attorney, not for a web page — but do ask it, because "I did not know" has never been a defence that impressed anybody.
The seven days
This is the part that catches people, because it costs money to obey and nothing visible happens if you ignore it.
Second-hand goods must be held for a period before they are resold or altered — seven days from the date of acquisition, under section 23(1)(d). How you actually count those seven days is its own question, and it catches more people than the rule itself does — we have written it up separately in Seven days, or seven working days?. The reason is simple: it gives the real owner of a stolen item a window to come looking, and it gives SAPS a chance to find it while it still exists in a recognisable form.
The temptation is obvious. A machine comes in on Monday, a buyer wants it on Tuesday, and the money is right there on the counter. The cost of waiting is real and the cost of not waiting is invisible — right up until the day it is not.
What makes this manageable is not willpower. It is a system that knows the date the item came in and says something when you try to sell it too early. A book that just records the sale will never protect you, because by the time it is written down the decision has already been made.
How this fits with the Consumer Protection Act
Two things worth knowing when you sell refurbished goods.
First, you must disclose that the goods are second-hand or reconditioned. Selling a refurbished unit as though it were new is a straightforward misrepresentation.
Second, the CPA's implied warranty of quality applies to second-hand goods too. You can sell something as-is with defects disclosed, but you cannot sell it as-is and stay silent about a fault you knew about. The honest move — and the one that produces fewer arguments — is to write the known faults on the invoice and have the buyer sign it. It reads as confidence, not weakness.
Keeping it without drowning
The failure mode we see most often is not dishonesty. It is a workshop that genuinely intends to keep the register, keeps it properly for three weeks, gets busy, and then has a book with a six-month hole in it. A hole is worse than no book, because it looks like something was removed.
Three things make the difference:
Capture it at intake, not later. The only reliable moment to record where something came from is while the person who brought it is still standing in front of you. Nobody has ever successfully reconstructed an ID number a fortnight afterwards.
Record the fact of the check, not a copy of the document. Under POPIA you should collect the minimum you need. What protects you is a dated note that you saw a valid identity document and recorded its number — not a photocopy of somebody's ID sitting in a drawer, which is now a data-protection problem of its own.
Let the system count the days. A person cannot be expected to remember, mid-sale, that a particular machine came in five days ago. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic is what software is for.
Dot Book's Workshop Edition does the last one: it holds the date each stock item was acquired, and when you go to sell something inside the seven days it stops and tells you how many days are left. You can still override it — the software will not lock you out of your own stock — but the override is a deliberate act by a person with the date in front of them, and the record says who did it and when. Be clear about what an override is, though: the Act gives nobody the power to authorise an early release. The old 1955 Act let a dealer move goods early “except after notice to the officer in charge of the nearest police station”; the 2009 Act deleted that exception and raised the maximum sentence to ten years. So an override is a risk you are choosing, not a permission you have.
That is the whole philosophy, really. The point of a book is not to make you compliant. It is to make sure that when someone asks a question about a machine that passed through your hands two years ago, you can answer it without your stomach dropping.