For second-hand dealers
The register that opens when they walk in.
Who you bought it from, when, what you paid, and whether it has been held long enough to sell. On your own counter, ready in seconds, and never on somebody else’s server.
The paperwork is the business
Anybody can buy and sell used goods. What separates a dealer who sleeps well from one who does not is whether the book can answer a question on the spot — where a particular item came from, who sold it, on what date, and whether it sat the required time before it went out again.
Most of that gets kept in a duplicate book, or a spreadsheet, or somebody’s memory. It works right up until the day it matters.
Who sold it to you
The seller’s name, ID number and address recorded against the item as you take it in, checked against the document in front of you. If the ID is missing, the book says so — it does not let it slide quietly.
When it came in
Every item carries the date you acquired it, and that date follows it — onto the shelf, into a job, back to stock. Move it around all you like; the clock does not restart.
The seven-day hold, enforced
Ring up something bought less than seven days ago and the till will not complete the sale — it tells you how many days are left. The only way past it is the owner recording an early release in their own name: the police officer they dealt with, their reference or case number, and why. That is written into the record with the sale, not offered as a quiet workaround — and the Act itself gives nobody the power to shorten the seven days.
Held or altered
The same check runs when you open a job card on second-hand goods, not only when you sell them. Stripping something inside the hold is a decision too, and it gets recorded the same way.
Nothing is deleted
Corrections are struck through with who changed them, when, and why. A register with no missing lines is worth far more than a tidy one.
It stays on your counter
The register lives on your own device. It is not uploaded, we cannot read it, and no third party holds your sellers’ identity details. It opens with the internet off. And it runs on any phone, tablet, laptop or desktop with a modern browser — a tablet on the counter is the usual choice, not a requirement.
Why not a cloud system?
You can use one, and plenty of dealers do. Two things are worth thinking about before you put a register of other people’s identity details onto somebody else’s computer.
- Your register holds sellers’ names, ID numbers and addresses — other people’s personal information, which you are responsible for protecting. Keeping it on your own premises is the simplest version of that job.
- When somebody asks to see the register, you want it open in seconds — not after a login, a password reset and a phone signal.
The honest trade is that the records live on your device, so the copy that survives a stolen counter is the one you kept somewhere else. Dot Book asks you to choose where that copy goes on your very first day, tells you in plain language how long it has been, and gets one off the device in a single tap — to your own cloud folder, WhatsApp or email, never through us. More on how that works.
And if the tablet is taken
The register is encrypted on your own device. What is stored is not a file somebody can open — it is unreadable without your passphrase, including to us. A thief gets the tablet and a file nobody can read.
The other half of that, said plainly because you should hear it from us rather than find out: if you lose both your passphrase and your recovery code, the register is gone. There is no reset link and nobody at Dot can recover it. That is the necessary price of nobody at Dot being able to read it either. Dot Book makes you write the recovery code down at setup, and will not finish setting up until you have typed it back.
What it does not do, so that the part above is worth believing: it does not protect you from someone watching you type the passphrase; it does not protect a tablet that is already unlocked and walks out of the shop, though it locks itself after twelve minutes; and it does not protect a machine somebody else has already tampered with. It is one mechanical thing done properly, not a certificate, and it does not make anyone compliant with anything.
A free tool, whether you buy anything or not
The seven-day hold is the rule dealers most often count wrong, and getting it wrong by two days can be a contravention whether or not anyone meant it. Our release-date calculator takes the date you took an item in and gives the earliest release date under the Act, on the reading it explains, with the working shown so you can check it rather than trust it. It handles Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and the Easter dates, and it says so plainly where the law itself is unsettled.
It runs entirely in your browser. The date never leaves your device, there is no sign-up, and it is useful whatever you keep your records in.
Optional: a document reader that never leaves your shop
Reading a seller’s identity document into the register is the slowest part of taking an item in, and it is where the number gets mistyped. Dot Book can read it from the photo you have already taken — the full names, the identity number, the address if it is on the document — and fill the empty fields for you to check against the original.
- It runs on one computer, and Dot Book runs on that same computer.
The reader is a vision model — software that reads text out of a photograph
— installed on a Windows PC in your shop. The photograph never leaves that
machine. It is read there and the answer appears in the form there. Cloud document
readers send your customers’ identity documents to somebody else’s
server; this one cannot, because there is no server.
To be straight about how it has to be set up: a browser will not let a page loaded from the internet talk to software running on your own machines — that is a deliberate security rule and a good one. So Dot Book has to be installed on your shop’s computer and opened from there, not from this website, for the reader to work at all. We are still testing the setup that lets a counter tablet use a reader running on the shop PC. Until we have proven it on real hardware we are not going to promise it, and we will tell you plainly which of the two you are getting before you pay for anything. - It suggests, you decide. Every field it fills stays marked as a suggestion until you have ticked that you checked it against the original document. Section 21(4) of the Act requires you to see the original; the reader does not change that. Once you tick, it writes the standard line recording that the original was inspected and naming you as the person who checked — and you can change that line.
- It checks its own reading. A South African identity number has a check digit and a date inside it. If what it read does not add up, it leaves the field blank and shows what it read beside it, for you to decide.
- It can be wrong, and it is built to say so. A model reading a worn or badly-lit document can misread a digit. That is why every field is a suggestion you check, why it leaves a note about anything it found unclear, and why it returns a blank rather than a guess. A blank gets typed from the original; a plausible wrong digit might get believed.
It is an installed extra rather than a switch in the app, because it needs a reasonably capable Windows PC in the shop to run on, it only works at that PC, and Dot Book has to be installed on that machine rather than opened from this website. Not every shop is set up that way, and we would rather say that than sell it to you and find out. Ask us whether your setup suits it — the conversation is free.
It is a shop, not just a register
The register is the part nobody else builds. The rest is an ordinary day: ring up a sale, take a repair in, see what a thing actually cost you by the time it went out the door.
- Till with cash-up, day totals and receipts
- Job cards for repairs and refurbishment, with parts and labour costed to the item
- True cost per item — what you paid, what you put into it, what you made
- Staff logins with their own rights, and every action recorded under a name
- Works with the internet off
Questions dealers ask
Does this make me compliant with the Act?
No, and be careful of anyone who says their software does. It keeps the record the Act expects you to keep, and it makes that record easy to produce and hard to fudge. Registration, your licence and your own conduct are yours. Take proper legal advice.
Can I still sell inside the seven days?
Not by choosing to — the till will not complete that sale. The only way through is the owner recording an early release in their own name: the attending officer's name, their reference or case number, and the reason, before the sale can go ahead. That is written into the record with the sale. It is not a box you tick to get past a formality, and nothing in the Act gives anyone the power to authorise it — the record exists so that what happened is on paper.
What if I forget to take the seller’s ID?
It tells you, at the moment you book the item in, that no seller ID was recorded. It does not block you — sometimes the world is untidy — but you will know then rather than months later.
How long are the records kept?
Indefinitely, on your device, until you remove them. Nothing expires and nothing is archived out of reach. Everything exports to a spreadsheet whenever you want.
What happens if I stop paying?
Your records are yours. They are on your device, they export to standard files, and we could not hold them hostage even if we wanted to — we do not have them.
What does it cost?
R750 a month, or R7,500 for the year. No setup fee, no per-till fee, no fee per staff member, and nothing taken off your card turnover. The full price list is here.
Worth a conversation
Tell us what you deal in and how you keep the register now. If Dot Book is not right for you we will say so — a dealer who buys the wrong thing tells other dealers.