Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael or Penny Novack]

I'm not aware of any church that has a membership fee, and I'd be 
amazed to learn of one. In the case of tithing (which is expected in 
only a very small minority of churches) I imagine it would be cast as 
a donation, and not as membership.


Our common law holds a membership fee to be contractual: it's 
consideration given in return for some benefit, and this is why it 
can't be a donation (and so is ineligible for Gift Aid). I wonder if 
possibly the exception you mention arises on a similar basis: if the 
benefits received are purely spiritual, possibly the law doesn't 
regard that as consideration for the fee, so there is no contract at 
common law, and so the "fee" is, after all, a donation.


Edward


I guess I need to give an example?

Normal/traditional/etc. for Jewish congregations, be they synagogues or 
temples to have membership "dues". Now these are often sliding scale and 
provision for abatements, etc. for those unable to afford the full 
amount (or any). Likewise assessments for building fund, etc.


That is why HERE the IRS has that exception "dues/memberships not 
deductible except if the only benefit is intangible/spiritual".


It is also possible one of the divergences in our "common law" doctrines 
(there are many). For example, membership in a congregation or 
organization might convey the right to vote. Over here that is 
considered an "intangible" benefit, not disqualifying membership dues 
from being considered a donation. But still recognizing "members" in a 
legal sense. Generally "de minimis" tangible benefits also do not 
disqualify. I could give some (non-religious) examples.


Michael D Novack



--
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality 
of the grave.

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Re: [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
, 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 
wrote:

> > On 29 Oct 2020, at 11:37, Chris Green  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 

Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Edward Bainton]

Yes, almost any donation to any charity (or community amateur sports club)
is eligible, and it would be unheard of for a church not to qualify as a
charity. (Perhaps not so unheard of for them not to register as such with
the tax authorities, as it's a lot of faff - as this thread makes clear.)

I'm not aware of any church that has a membership fee, and I'd be amazed to
learn of one. In the case of tithing (which is expected in only a very
small minority of churches) I imagine it would be cast as a donation, and
not as membership.

Our common law holds a membership fee to be contractual: it's
consideration given in return for some benefit, and this is why it can't be
a donation (and so is ineligible for Gift Aid). I wonder if possibly the
exception you mention arises on a similar basis: if the benefits received
are purely spiritual, possibly the law doesn't regard that as consideration
for the fee, so there is no contract at common law, and so the "fee" is,
after all, a donation.

Edward
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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael or Penny Novack]

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.



Just curious about that, whether it applies to "churches".

In other words, I do understand what that exclusion is all about 
(because of your "sports clubs", etc. but wonder whether it also applies 
to those religions that traditionally/customarily have "membership" 
dues/fees.


We have a similar rule here BUT for the reason that we don't have an 
established/favored religion and that is enshrined in the Constitution 
that rule does NOT apply to religious organizations. The IRS wording 
"but not if that membership only involves non-material/spiritual benefits"


The curiosity mainly because many of the UK groups asking are churches.

Michael D Novack


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Re: [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 
wrote:

> > On 29 Oct 2020, at 14:29, 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 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:
>
> 
> 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.
> 
>
>
> >
> > 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 

Re: [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 >>


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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael Hendry]

> On 29 Oct 2020, at 14:29, 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 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:


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.



> 
> 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
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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 02:29:17PM +, 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
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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael Hendry]

> On 29 Oct 2020, at 11:37, Chris Green  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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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 06:26:08AM -0400, Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 10/29/2020 5:18 AM, Chris Green wrote:
> > I am treasurer for a small PCC in the UK.
> > 
> > I know there are other similar charity treasurer's hereabouts.
> > 
> > How do you handle Gift-Aid in your accounts, or do you not bother at
> > all and simply record the datail of Gift-Aid donations separately for
> > making the on-line claim?
> > 
> > It seems a pity to have to record things twice but on the other hand
> > the level of detail required for the claim to HMRC is much more than
> > one wants to have in the annual accounts.
> 
> Not in the UK. But this appears similar to here "grants" of the
> reimbursement type. But with an added twist. Not only having to track
> eligible expenses but also not all donations eligible,
> 
> The donations part easy. Just have two sub accounts under donations, one for
> eligible and one for not.
> 
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.


> On the expense side, I need to know what else you need to submit
> besides a number << all the reimbursement grants I dealt with also
> required copies of receipts/invoices >>.  If JUST expenses (just
> numbers) then again a simple partition eligible for Gift-Aid/Not. 
> The extra work (entering twice) does not exist unless your board
> wants applying for reimbursement continuously.  Not going to be that
> much extra work if done say quarterly transferring "unclaimed" to
> "claimed".
> 
Nothing on the expense side is affected by Gift-Aid (or at least I
don't think it is!).

-- 
Chris Green
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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 10/29/2020 5:18 AM, Chris Green wrote:

I am treasurer for a small PCC in the UK.

I know there are other similar charity treasurer's hereabouts.

How do you handle Gift-Aid in your accounts, or do you not bother at
all and simply record the datail of Gift-Aid donations separately for
making the on-line claim?

It seems a pity to have to record things twice but on the other hand
the level of detail required for the claim to HMRC is much more than
one wants to have in the annual accounts.


Not in the UK. But this appears similar to here "grants" of the 
reimbursement type. But with an added twist. Not only having to track 
eligible expenses but also not all donations eligible,


The donations part easy. Just have two sub accounts under donations, one 
for eligible and one for not.


On the expense side, I need to know what else you need to submit besides 
a number << all the reimbursement grants I dealt with also required 
copies of receipts/invoices >>. If JUST expenses (just numbers) then 
again a simple partition eligible for Gift-Aid/Not. The extra work 
(entering twice) does not exist unless your board wants applying for 
reimbursement continuously. Not going to be that much extra work if done 
say quarterly transferring "unclaimed" to "claimed".


I know it might seem like trouble. But at every board meeting I expected 
to have among the questions "how much do we have left of the XYZ grant".


Michael D Novack


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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Peter West]

Thank you Chris. Apostrophe pollution is uncontrolled. Where are the Apostrophe 
Police?

> On 29 Oct 2020, at 7:25 pm, Chris Green  wrote:
> 
>> 
>> I know there are other similar charity treasurer's hereabouts.
>> 
> Oops, the grocer's apostophe has appeared!
> 
> I know there are other similar charity treasurers hereabouts.
> 
> :-)
> 
> -- 
> Chris Green

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Re: [GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Chris Green]

> 
> I know there are other similar charity treasurer's hereabouts.
> 
Oops, the grocer's apostophe has appeared!

I know there are other similar charity treasurers hereabouts.

:-)

-- 
Chris Green
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[GNC] Managing UK Gift-Aid

[Chris Green]

I am treasurer for a small PCC in the UK.

I know there are other similar charity treasurer's hereabouts.

How do you handle Gift-Aid in your accounts, or do you not bother at
all and simply record the datail of Gift-Aid donations separately for
making the on-line claim?

It seems a pity to have to record things twice but on the other hand
the level of detail required for the claim to HMRC is much more than
one wants to have in the annual accounts.

-- 
Chris Green
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