How to reconcile Dona income
Donation stations, or contactless card readers, can help your church or charity collect donations on-site using contactless card payments.
Dona is one option for collecting donation income in this way.
This article explains how to reconcile Dona income in ExpensePlus, and highlights some things to consider when choosing which donation station to use.
In this article:
Choosing a donation station
When choosing your hardware and software for your donation station, there are a number of important factors to consider such as:
- Cost of the hardware
- User experience for those donating
- Donation fees
- Whether there is an easy way to reconcile donations within your accounting package
- How easy it will be to claim Gift Aid on donations given.
These last two questions, how to reconcile donations and how to claim Gift Aid, are often not considered as part of the decision-making process, which can cause issues when processing the donation income and reconciling transactions.
Charities using or considering Dona should be aware:
- Dona uses Stripe as the payment processor, which handles the payments that are taken.
- ExpensePlus has an integrated Stripe feed, which makes it easy to reconcile money collected via Stripe within ExpensePlus.
- However, Dona do not include either the donor's name or the fund within the Stripe transaction, which makes reconcilation of donations collected via Dona problematic, no matter which accounting software you are using.
- Using Dona, once transactions are imported, there is no easy way to know which transaction relates to which donor, or which fund.
How to reconcile donation income via Dona
Option 1: Reconciling Stripe Transactions
Typically, we recommend connecting your Stripe account within ExpensePlus, which provides an automated transaction feed, then reconciling transactions using the efficient bank reconcilation process. However, because Dona doesn't include donor names or funds within the Stripe transaction description, this makes reconciling donations problematic. In order to reconcile Stripe transactions to the correct donor, you will need to individually search for each transaction within Dona in order to know how to code it, which is both slow and likely to result in errors. Therefore, if you are using your Stripe account for Dona, we'd typically recommend that you don't connect to the Stripe automated feed from within ExpensePlus.
Option 2: Reconciling Stripe Payouts as Mixed Income on your main bank account statement
When you reconcile your uploaded bank transactions, select the Stripe payout on the left-hand table of your match transactions screen, click the + button, then, in the popup that appears, select the transaction type as 'mixed income'
Within the 'Enter Mixed Income' screen, enter the details for the transactions in the Stripe payout:
- Named Donations - a line per donation transaction
- GASDS Donations - typically not relevant (only for any donations via a contactless Stripe card reader where the amount per individual donation is £30 or less)
- Income (other) - for all other income, such as ticket / book / cafe sales
- Less Expenditure - for the total of the fees deducted (typically grouped into a single expenditure line).
Realistically, this is the best option; however, if you want to record the individual donations (name and fund) that are part of the payout when doing this, like in Option 1 above, you will need to search for this information within Dona and key this information into ExpensePlus.
You can also use the Mixed Income option to record the total of the donations included in the payout, without splitting the donations by donor name and fund. To do this:
- Record the total amount in the 'Other Income' section as a single line.
- Use multiple lines if donations are split between funds.
- Add a line in the 'fees' section for the total of the fees deducted (or multiple fees lines if split across funds).
Whilst this option is the most efficient way to reconcile the Stripe payout, it means that donations given via Dona won't show up in the donation reports, and Gift Aid will need to be claimed outside of ExpensePlus.
How to claim Gift Aid on donations via Dona
Unless you record the individual donations that have been given via Dona within ExpensePlus (which isn't that easy to do), you won't be able to claim Gift Aid on donations via Dona within ExpensePlus.
If you do record donations via Dona as individual donations within ExpensePlus, to claim Gift Aid, the Gift Aid declaration needs to be entered in ExpensePlus for each donor (even if a donor has already completed a Gift Aid declaration within Dona.
You can enter Gift Aid declarations within the Manage Donors screen in ExpensePlus.
This is both manual and requires checking of which Gift Aid declarations exist within Dona that haven't been added to ExpensePlus.
Alternatively, you may wish to choose to create Gift Aid claims using the data within Dona and manually submit these directly to HMRC (outside of ExpensePlus). This may realistically be your best option.
To better understand the Bank Reconciliation module, please view the module overview video here.