[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael Hendry]

> On 29 Oct 2020, at 11:37, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
> It's not that easy!  
> 
> For us it's mostly collections in church that are affected (at least
> they're the ones that I'm dealing with), each member of the
> congregation who wants ( and can) get their donation gift aided `puts
> their collection in an envelope and fills out the details (name,
> address, signature, etc.) on the envelope.  Thus after the service
> there are two piles, one "Gift-Aided" and the other not.  That's fine,
> I can record two 'income' items.
> 
> The trouble is that HMRC needs a lot more detail, or at least it has
> to be available, you need each donation with name, address, amount and
> date.  These need to go onto an on-line "spreadsheet".
> 
> It *may* be that all I need to do is either keep (or scan) all the
> envelopes and then, at the end of the year, feed all the data into the
> HMRC "spreadsheet" form to make the claim.
> 
> I was just wondering how others do it.

Hi, Chris.

I am treasurer of our local Rotary Club’s Charitable Trust and have to deal with Gift Aid.

At our weekly meetings (ah yes, I remember them!) we routinely collect a rounded-up cash amount for dinner and donate the balance to the Charitable Trust as a painless way of topping it up.

We keep Gift Aid Declarations for all of our members, which specify “all donations made since dd mmm 2004” as one of the options, along with an undertaking to notify the treasurer of change of gift aid tax status and address.

When I took over as Treasurer I inherited a set of spreadsheets for the accounts from my predecessor, including a separate one for Gift Aid.

I’m not keen on spreadsheets for bookkeeping, and set up a parallel set of books in GnuCash.

At first I thought I could deal with Gift Aid within GC, but it turned out to be very awkward and I reverted to using the original spreadsheet.

The columns of this are for meeting dates (presumably 52 Sundays for you), and the rows are for Gift-Aid eligible members. I use the column totals to check that the Gift Aid spreadsheet matches the total cash recorded for the day in GC, and that the grand total matches the eventual Gift Aid claim,

Some tweaking will be required if a member stops being eligible for Gift Aid (e.g. an additional row for "Joe Bloggs - no gift aid”), and for ad-hoc donations.

This means that the GC book takes no account of Gift Aid, apart from the receipt of the payment from HMRC.

If a scan of the Gift Aid declaration would be helpful, I can let you have one. It was drawn up a member of the club who was involved as a lawyer in the setting up of the trust in the first place, but this would be under Scots Law, which may not apply to you.

Regards,

Michael