[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael Hendry]

> On 29 Oct 2020, at 14:29, Edward Bainton <bainton.ete at gmail.com> 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 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).

But remember that you can’t just use the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS) in isolation - see https://www.gov.uk/claim-gift-aid/small-donations-scheme

Relevant extract:

<quote>
Who can claim
Your charity or CASC must have claimed Gift Aid:

	• in the same tax year as you want to claim GASDS
	• without getting a penalty in the last 2 tax years
	• in at least 2 of the last 4 tax years (without a 2-year gap between claims) if you’re claiming on donations made before 6 April 2017
What you can claim
Your GASDS claim cannot be more than 10 times your Gift Aid claim. For example, you can claim on £1,000 worth of donations through GASDS if you’ve received £100 of Gift Aid donations in the same tax year.

You can claim on donations that are eligible for Gift Aid, but not membership fees.
</quote>


> 
> 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.

The club pays the venue a fixed price per diner and this figure is rounded up in the charge collected at the door from each member.

> 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?

So yes, everyone pays the same, and all club members (who are eligible to do so) have signed a form saying all donations from date X are eligible for Gift Aid.

> 
> 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"?

It hasn’t happened in my period as treasurer, but I suspect the “from date X” declaration was put in to ensure that there was cover from the date the trust came into existence.

> 
> And once you introduce that level of complexity, how can you be absolutely sure you're claiming every GA donation once, and once only?

Well, you have to keep records...

> 
> 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?

I keep a spreadsheet for every claim year, with dates associated with the contributions, and make the claims based on the relevant spreadsheet. If the contribution isn’t in the spreadsheets, it won’t have been claimed, but how would a relevant donation be made yet slip past the reconciliation of the books with the spreadsheet?

> 
> 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. 

Indeed!

Michael