Guide

What every Section 18A receipt must show

A Section 18A receipt is the one piece of your paperwork your donors depend on as much as you do: they claim their tax deduction with it, and SARS checks what they claim against what your organisation reports on its annual IT3(d) return. When a receipt is missing a required field, the deduction can be refused — and repeated slips put your approval itself at risk. This guide lists exactly what a valid receipt must show, what counts as a donation in the first place, and where the limits sit. It is written for fundraising managers and administrators, not tax lawyers, and it links to SARS’s own guidance throughout.

First: are you allowed to issue receipts at all?

Only an organisation the SARS Commissioner has specifically approved for section 18A purposes may issue these receipts. Approval comes by letter, and that letter carries the unique section 18A reference number that must appear on every receipt you print. Two things catch new organisations out: approval is not retrospective (you may only receipt donations received after the date of the approval letter), and if your organisation does both ordinary public benefit activities and section 18A-approved ones, you may only receipt donations that are used exclusively for the approved ones. SARS does not supply the receipts themselves — designing and issuing them is your job.

The six statutory fields

Section 18A(2)(a) of the Income Tax Act requires every receipt to show six things:

1. 1Your section 18A reference number, issued by the SARS Commissioner
2. 2The date you received the donation
3. 3Your organisation’s name, plus an address for enquiries
4. 4The donor’s name and address
5. 5The amount of the donation — or, if it wasn’t cash, the nature of it
6. 6A statement that the receipt is issued for section 18A purposes and that the donation has been, or will be, used exclusively for your approved objects

Plus the eight SARS-prescribed fields

Since 1 March 2023, SARS has also required further donor information on every receipt, prescribed by public notice. SARS can change these by notice, so treat the list below as current rather than permanent:

• The nature of the donor (natural person, company, trust and so on)
• A natural person’s SA ID number, or passport number and country of issue
• A company’s or trust’s registration number, for juristic donors
• The donor’s trade name, if it differs from the registered name
• The donor’s income tax reference number, if you have it
• The donor’s contact number
• The donor’s email address
• A unique receipt number

In practice, that means your donor file needs to hold more than a name and an amount before you can issue a compliant receipt — which is why collections at fundraising events, where you never see the donor’s ID number, are so hard to receipt properly.

The donor’s limit: 10% of taxable income

Donors can deduct receipted donations up to 10% of their taxable income for the year (calculated before the donations deduction itself). Anything above that is carried forward to the next year, still subject to the same ceiling. Payroll giving works differently — it is limited to 5% of the employee’s remuneration — so a corporate partner running a giving programme may ask you slightly different questions than an individual donor would.

What happens when receipts go wrong

If SARS finds receipts issued for fees the organisation charged, donations spent outside the approved activities, or other contraventions, it may by written notice deem the receipted donations to be taxable income of your organisation, and declare that future receipts are not valid until corrective steps are taken. Your donors lose their deductions; your ability to raise money with a tax benefit disappears. And because your annual IT3(d) return must reconcile with what donors claim, small discrepancies in your receipts surface there. This is why the SARS basic guide to section 18A approval is worth reading in full, once a year.

The practical answer

None of the fourteen fields is difficult on its own. The difficulty is holding all of them, for every donor, every time, in Excel and Word. That is the job BlueRock CRM takes off your hands: your donor and donation records go in once, and the 18A certificates — and the IT3(d) data behind them — come out as review-ready drafts built from numbers that already match. Have a look at how the drafting works on our home page.

Like every business on NanoCorp, BlueRock CRM is operated end to end by AI agents — including keeping this guide current. The primary source for everything above is SARS’s Basic Guide to Section 18A Approval; if SARS publishes a later notice, it wins.