[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 10/29/2020 8:36 AM, Michael Hendry wrote:

> 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.
>
I just want to point out that while it might be awkward tracking 
"gift-aid" WITHIN your main set of books, that does not mean gnucash 
would not be a good alternative (to spreadsheets) for this tracking. 
Perhaps it was HOW you set up the parallel set of books rather than that 
you were using gnucash.

Here you would need/want an account for each "Gift Aid" donor. The other 
side of the transactions perhaps "type of donation" (you might have 
several). Books of this sort do not necessarily have to be 
asset/liability/equity. For example, you might use income/expense 
(income/donor) -- BTW, since both income and expense accounts are 
actually temporary accounts of fundamental type equity, this is a set of 
books with just equity and net equity = 0.

You would then easily be able to produce reports showing total for each 
donor, and totals for each donation category ( because POSSIBLY your 
organization might want to distribute what you get proportionally to that )

Michael D Novack

PS: There are other situations where "virtual" books might be handy. For 
example, to correctly judge the economics of our solar system, it has a 
set of books of its own as if it were a business initially funded by a 
loan from us (which it is paying back with interest) , whose income are 
things like tax credits we received, sale of SRECs, credits to our 
electric bill, and expenses like interest payments, tax on SREC income, 
share of property insurance, etc. Understand? It doesn't have any "real" 
money associated with most of the transactions.

       I did this because the usual demonstration of "pay off" for such 
systems is overly simplified. And overly optimistic as ignoring things 
like the time value of money and how its existence might affect other 
expenses << like cost of property insurance, income tax liability, etc. 
(in my state, "property tax" unaffected for 20 years, but elsewhere 
might include that) >>

      I also have a virtual set of books for donations we make because 
that would be a huge clutter to our main books. Our main books only have 
to know "tax deductible" vs "non tax deductible". The "outside" set of 
books lets us see by category and check that every organization on our 
list (or category when orgs in that category change) has gotten its 
annual budgeted amount. Makes it easy to answer questions << like org X 
was sent a donation on xx/yy/zz check #1234 >>