How do I allocate Gift Aid Income from HMRC?

ExpensePlus creates separate claims for each fund, making it easy to allocate payments from HMRC to the correct fund.

Typically, Gift Aid income from HMRC is recorded within the Match Transactions screen once the bank statement in which it appears has been uploaded. Simply select the transaction on the left-hand table, click the + button, select the 'income received' option, add the details for the transactions, and select the fund/category it relates to (you can check the completed claims section on the Gift Aid screen if you are not sure).

Some organisations claim Gift Aid Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly; others claim more sporadically. Larger organisations often claim monthly in order to be able to attribute Gift Aid income not just to a fund, but also to a month (albeit that this is slightly complicated by backdated Gift Aid amounts that might be able to be claimed where a donor completes a Gift Aid declaration and chooses a backdated start date). Typically, GASDS is claimed annually at the end of the tax year.

Gift Aid often accounts for a significant part of most organisations' income, so should you choose to claim Gift Aid not on a regular monthly basis, you may wish to adjust the budget profile for your Gift Aid income categories to match when you plan to make claims and receive income (e.g. if you plan to claim Gift Aid quarterly, then it's worth considering profiling the budget for the income category you will record this against rather than choosing the default option of 'linear' when you set this budget up within the Income & Expenditure Category Settings screen). You can read more about this here.

If you create accounts on an accruals basis, you may instead decide that you wish to create a monthly accrual for Gift Aid so that it can be allocated to the month it relates to (rather than the month it arrives in the bank). This often simplifies reporting greatly and removes artificially created peaks and troughs caused when Gift Aid claims are made. For details on how to create this adjustment, click here. Organsations creating accounts on cash/receipts & payments basis should NOT do this.