Recording income 'received' via gift aid

Thomas Kay

I am at a loss with this so would really appreciate any advice!


When gift aid income is received from HMRC, how do you record this on RE?


As I understand, the 'tax claim amount' from gift aid is not acknowledged on appeal or campaign summaries or reports and therefore the actual income/pledged income is not reflected accurately. The only place I can see that it shows up is on a gfit tax detail report which isn't that helpful when looking at overall income by campaign or appeal.


Therefore, I thought the gift aid may have to be recorded as a gift (on a central record) but Blackbaud said this would be wrong to do as gift aid ‘needs to be associated with a constituent in case HMRC does an audit then you will need to have proof’.


I don't want to double count but I can't see how:

a) the 'tax claim amount' can be factored into campaign/appeal summaries and reports or

b) any other way to record gift aid income received.


Thanks all - hope that makes some sort of sense...

Tom

James Redding

Most place i've worked in have created a HMRC constitunet records for each financial year.  When the gift aid is received back, the gift aid is coded to the HMRC record and to the appeal that generated the gift aid.  This way if you run a query for an appeal you can see the total amount of income raised by the appeal including gift aid.   There may be other ways to do this but it what i've seen or implemented at 5 organisations.

Paul Morriss

We put the gift aid as a new gift back on the original constituent record for the same fund as the original gift. We have a spreadsheet that takes a query of gifts received under the original claim and creates gift import records.The disadvantage of this is that for queries that don't want to look at gift aid you have to exclude those gift aid refund gifts (which we do because they have an import id that begins with "GATAX").

Thomas Kay

Thank you both - really interesting to see different organisations are doing it in different ways! Is there a best practice?


James' solution seems the most straightforward but this opposes Blackbauds comment that gift aid has to be directly associated with the constituent whom it was claimed on behalf of.


Paul - is that the reason you don't use a central HMRC record?


I guess you both agree that it needs to be put on somehow, which is why I find it so strange that there is no straightfroward way. Blackbaud seemed to suggest that it doesn't need to be added on as it shows under tax claim amount - but I don't see that (for the reasons explained)!