[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Edward Bainton]

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
<https://www.gov.uk/claim-gift-aid/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).

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.

Edward

On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 at 12:37, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com>
wrote:

> > 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
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