[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Edward Bainton]

> Your GASDS claim cannot be more than 10 times your Gift Aid claim.

Ah yes, good catch: I hadn't reckoned with more than a small proportion of
donations coming across the plate.

> 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.

I'm no accountant, but without explicit opt-in to donate the refund as cash
once it's been determined how much would otherwise be due to the diner, I
wonder if that's ancillary trading at surplus (by Rotary), rather than
donations made (by diners), hence not GA-able. I don't mean to second-guess
your processes though as you may have advice to the contrary; just my
thoughts.

> I suspect the “from date X” declaration was put in to ensure that there
was cover from the date the trust came into existence.

Ah possibly. I'd understood it's so donor tax-payers can claim in
higher-rated years for earlier (lower-rated) years' donations - to
help with smoothing for people who are in and out of the higher rate bands.
There's also provision for smoothing in the other direction on the Self
Assessment tax return, iirc.

> Well, you have to keep records...

Quite! As someone completely new to bookkeeping when I took the job on, and
(ahem) making it up as I go, this has been a challenge: I thought it would
be easy, but versions of the spreadsheet have a way of breeding
uncontrolled in dark corners of the computer, and I regularly come unstuck.
Your earlier comments describing your dinners spreadsheet are useful, and
the itemised GA claim is, I suppose, the obvious way to go - thank you.

Edward

On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 at 16:46, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com>
wrote:

> > 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