Some 20% of charities are in financial difficulties, yet each year, we fail to claim £600 million in Gift Aid. This resource from my free Charity Excellence Framework online toolkit, gives you everything you need to make sure you're maximising yours.

Gift Aid, can be claimed by registered charities on donations from UK tax payers so, if these make up a reasonable proportion of your income, why wouldn't you? You get an additional 25p from HMRC for every £1 donated. Think what you could do with that?  You have to be registered with HMRC, but you can make a claim up to 4 years retrospectively.  Here’s a very short guide to Gift Aid to get you started.

·        For donations over £30, ask each donor to sign a Gift Aid declaration and keep this on file. There are 2 versions – single donation and multiple donations. 

·        For small donations using collections tins/buckets, you can claim for donations of up to £30 (£20 prior to 6 Apr 19), with less administration, under the Small Donations Scheme. Here’s an explanatory guide and also the more detailed official version.  

·        If you have joined a fundraising platform, these normally automatically collect and pay Gift Aid and some will accept unregistered charities, but they can’t claim this for you until you are registered. However, they should send you regular donation reports (usually an Excel file in .csv format). All you need to do is to retain these, until your HMRC registration comes through.

·        If you sell donated goods via a shop, auction or website, you can claim Retail Gift Aid.

Here’s a guide to making your 1st claim, once HMRC registered and here is a Gift Aid FAQS and common mistakes list to help you. If you're a registered charity, but aren't yet registered with HMRC, here's my guide on how to do so.

And that's just one of many charitable tax reliefs. Here are links to all the others.

The free Charity Excellence Framework online toolkit, enables trustees/management to improve impact, financial resources and performance, in every area. Using it, you can claim all your tax reliefs, identify financial savings, improve your fundraising and it has links to 200+ organisations providing free goods, services and help to charities. The toolkit, its huge range of resources and quality mark are completely free, and are both easy to use and low workload.