Fundraising and SARS compliance, automated for South African NPOs

The situation

South African non-profits run their fundraising across fragmented systems — a spreadsheet of donors here, a payment link there, a folder of tax certificates somewhere else. Every donation then has to be reconciled by hand, and every year the organisation faces a SARS compliance exercise assembled from records that were never designed to produce it. For organisations already short of administrative capacity, that work comes directly out of the time and money meant for their actual cause.

10 Bucks Only came to us with a clear brief: replace that whole arrangement with one platform, and take the commission out of donations while doing it.

The constraint

Section 18A receipts and IT3(d) submissions aren't a reporting nicety — they're a legislated obligation, and the output has to satisfy SARS rather than merely look correct. On top of that, the platform had to work as multi-tenant software serving many organisations at once, each with its own donors, its own records and its own money, with donations settling directly into the NPO's account rather than pooling anywhere in between.

What we built

A cloud-hosted SaaS platform covering the full donation lifecycle. NPOs create fundraising campaigns with their own project pages, share them publicly and watch progress update in real time. Donations are processed through Ozow via secure Instant EFT, settling directly into the organisation's account with no commission taken. Every donation writes to a central donor database that carries full giving history, segmentation and analytics, alongside a self-service portal donors can use themselves.

The compliance layer is the part that removes the most work. Section 18A certificates are generated and distributed automatically as donations come in, and SARS-compliant IT3(d) files are produced from the same records — so the annual submission is a report the system already holds rather than a reconstruction exercise. Around that sit role-based access control with unlimited users, cloud document management, a reporting dashboard, data import for organisations migrating off spreadsheets, and SSL encryption throughout.

PsalmTech delivered the project end to end: business analysis and solution architecture, UI/UX design, the corporate website, front-end and back-end engineering, database architecture, payment gateway integration, compliance workflow automation, QA and testing, deployment and cloud hosting — and we maintain and support it on an ongoing basis.

The outcome

10Bucksonly.co.za is live and serving South African non-profits as a single system for fundraising, donor management and tax compliance. Administrative work that was manual — issuing receipts, chasing donor records, assembling the annual SARS return — now happens as a by-product of taking a donation. Campaigns can be launched in a fraction of the time an organisation would previously have needed, donation records are held securely and auditably in one place, and the architecture is built to scale to organisations nationwide rather than to a fixed roster.

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