Free tool · For second-hand goods dealers
Seven-day release date calculator
Type the date you took the item in. It gives the earliest date you may lawfully deliver it, strip it or alter its appearance — and shows exactly how it counted, so you can check it rather than trust it.
What this is doing
Section 23(1)(d) of the Second-Hand Goods Act 6 of 2009 forbids a dealer to “deliver goods acquired by him or her to a person or change the form or alter the appearance thereof until after the expiration date of a period of seven days from the date of acquisition thereof”.
The Act does not define “day”, so section 4 of the Interpretation Act 33 of 1957 supplies the rule: a period is reckoned exclusively of the first and inclusively of the last day, unless the last day falls on a Sunday or a public holiday, in which case those are excluded too. Two things follow, and each costs a day: the day you bought it is not day one, and the seventh day is inside the period — so the earliest lawful day is the one after it.
Saturdays count. Section 4 names only Sundays and public holidays. Plenty of other South African rules exclude Saturdays — that is where “seven working days” comes from — but this is not one of them.
Public holidays come from the Public Holidays Act 36 of 1994, including section 2(1): when a holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday is a public holiday too. Easter moves, so Good Friday and Family Day are worked out for the year in question.
What it cannot tell you
- Whether the two readings of section 4 are settled. They are not. Where they disagree this tool gives you the later date, because there is no offence in holding goods too long and a serious one in releasing them early. When that happens it says so and shows you both.
- Whether the Act applies to you at all. It reaches further than most people assume, and goods worth less than R100 fall outside the definition. Who is caught.
- Anything about a particular item. The seven days start again in each dealer’s hands — buying from a colleague who has already held it a fortnight does not inherit his clock — and held goods must be kept physically separate from your ordinary stock of the same kind under section 23(2).
- Whether a court would agree. We found no reported South African case interpreting section 23(1)(d). This is read off the words of the two Acts.
- A once-off holiday. The table knows the Schedule 1 holidays and the two that move with Easter. A day the President proclaims a public holiday for one year only is not in it. A proclaimed holiday earlier in the week changes nothing; if one lands on the seventh day, the tool's date is too early — step past it, and past any Sunday or holiday that follows, yourself.
Doing it once is easy. Doing it every time is the problem.
This page counts one item. A yard takes in a dozen a week, and the arithmetic goes wrong on a busy Friday rather than at a desk. That is what Dot Book does about it: it stamps the acquisition date on the item itself, works out this same date, and will not let the till ring the item up before it. It does not make anyone compliant — no software does. It takes the counting off a person.
The full write-up, with worked examples and the sources: Seven days, or seven working days?