Know where your application is.
Know what is due next.
Sentry tracks South African firearm licence, renewal and competency applications against the SAPS Central Firearms Register — and counts down the statutory 90-day renewal deadline for every licence you hold.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by the South African Police Service. Status data comes from a public SAPS page and may be out of date.
The deadline
A renewal must be lodged 90 days before expiry
Not on the expiry date — ninety days before it. Miss that window and the licence cannot simply be renewed. Sentry works the date out for every licence you record and bands it, so the question "is anything due?" is answered at a glance.
More than 90 days before the lodge-by date.
31 to 90 days to go. Time to gather documents.
30 days or fewer. This is the one people miss.
The deadline to lodge has passed.
Applications show real progress
The ring maps the status SAPS actually returned onto a stage. A status Sentry cannot place draws a dashed ring rather than an invented percentage.
The law behind the dates
Read the section the countdown comes from
“The holder of a licence issued in terms of this Chapter who wishes to renew the licence must at least 90 days before the date of expiry of the licence apply to the Registrar for its renewal.”
Firearms Control Act 60 of 2000, s 24(1)
The Act is four documents, not one, and eight statutes have amended it — part of the 2006 amendment is still unproclaimed. Sentry keeps a map of it: the amending statutes, the section 27 validity periods behind every expiry date in the app, and links to the official text.
How it works
Three steps, then it runs itself
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Add your references
Enter the SAPS reference number for each application you are waiting on, and the expiry date of each licence you hold.
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Sentry watches
The SAPS status page publishes a "data updated on" date. Sentry checks it hourly and only re-reads your applications when it actually moves.
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You get told
A status change becomes a notification and a dated entry in the application timeline. Renewal reminders are scheduled against the 90-day deadline.
What you get
One record of everything you have to keep
Applications
Every reference in one list, each with a timeline of what changed and when. No more logging in to check a page that has not moved.
Licences & firearms
An inventory of what you own and what covers it, with the expiry engine working out the lodge-by date for each licence.
Document vault
Competency certificates, licence cards and proof of posting, kept with the record they belong to and encrypted at rest.
On your phone and in the browser
The mobile app and this portal read the same records and are drawn from the same design system, so the 90-day rule has one implementation and both surfaces agree on what it says. Reminders are scheduled on-device as well as pushed, so they still arrive when the network does not.
Read this first
What Sentry is not
It is not SAPS. Sentry has no relationship with the South African Police Service and no special access. It reads the same public status page you can read yourself, and it is not endorsed by anyone.
It is not authoritative. That page updates periodically and can be incomplete or stale. The record of truth is the Designated Firearms Officer at the station where you applied — if the two disagree, they are right.
It is not legal advice. Sentry tells you a date is approaching. What you must do about it is between you and the Firearms Control Act.
Stop checking a page that has not changed
Add your references and your licence dates once. Sentry watches the rest.