[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 02:29:17PM +0000, Edward Bainton wrote:
>    I'm also a charity treasurer in the UK (tho I think officially I'm
>    called the secretary...). I'm on this list because I'd love to be able
>    to use GC for the charity finances, but the Gift Aid thing is a
>    significant hurdle to clear.
>    First, the church collections: it sounds as if you could possibly
>    simplify by using the [1]Small Donations Scheme, designed for exactly
>    that situation. Assuming no one puts in more than GBP30 in the plate
>    unenveloped, you can get GA on all donations in the plate, even if the
>    donor is unknown (as they will be) or some are known not to pay tax.
>    You only need an enveloped, personally identifiable donation if a
>    parishioner wants to donate more than GBP30 cash into the plate. I
>    don't know where your parish is, but I'm guessing unless it's Mayfair
>    the modal donation amount is well under 30 quid? Larger donors can be
>    encouraged to use a s/o (and will probably want to put a token amount
>    of cash in the plate, too).

Yes, I explored the government site about Gift-Aid and saw the
new[ish] Small Donations Scheme.  It does help but you need a 'good
background' with HMRC to be able to use it.  We do have that
background so hopefully it does make things a bit simpler for us.
However we do have people who put more than £30 in the plate
especially now when services are not every Sunday.


>    Second, Rotary dinners: this is another case where, if it's applicable,
>    the Small Donations Scheme may make things easier. But if it's
>    _not_ applicable (and the money may be seen as a waiver rather than a
>    donation, which is not eligible for GA), I worry that even if you have
>    GA declarations from every member present at the dinner, you may not be
>    able to claim GA - because it won't be clear how much each member has
>    donated. Unless you can rely on every diner owing the same, every diner
>    having signed a GA declaration, and every diner contributing the same
>    amount more than their dues when it comes to settling the bill?
>    The extra headaches I'd love people's thoughts on are these:
>    How do you deal with a GA declaration 3 years (say) after the donation,
>    which says "I want the charity to treat all my donations in the past 4
>    years as Gift Aid"?
>    And once you introduce that level of complexity, how can you be
>    absolutely sure you're claiming every GA donation once, and once only?
>    The only way I can manage is with a spreadsheet, which details the date
>    of declaration and the effective date (by default, date of signature
>    minus 4 years). Excel's hopeless at dates, but you can just about
>    bludgeon it into filtering out all donations by J. Bloggs that are
>    GA-able, versus his donations that are not. I haven't got this far, but
>    I assume another field against the donation for 'GA claimed no / GA
>    claimed dd mm yy' would prevent double-counting?
>    By the by, I suspect this is why there are so many proprietary donation
>    gateways that will take care of this for you - though how well they do
>    that, I don't know. (I just know PayPal is a nightmare.) And of course
>    they can't do the cash.

It is rather a can of worms isn't it!

I'm beginning to think that maybe my strategy of scanning and storing
the scans of donors envelopes may well be the least worst solution.

-- 
Chris Green