Are you one of the numerous charities and organisations that have identified both paper and electronic Gift Aid documents, taking up space, awaiting audit, but time and staff pressures prohibit you from completing this exercise?
Whilst your donor forms are sitting in storage, they aren’t generating revenue, meaning you could be missing out on up to an additional 25% in tax that could be claimed from HMRC.
But it’s not only missed revenue to think about. With HMRC continuously undertaking audits, its essential for Charity trustees to ensure that all claims are correct. Some of the common issues that can invalidate declarations include insufficient wording, incomplete personal details and declarations not joining up with supporting records for the donation.
So how do you ensure your Gift Aid processes are accurate, and revenue is not missed, whilst having limited resources to keep on top of these in house?
By letting a specialist take on the burden from you.
By outsourcing these projects, you could see the following benefits:
- Income preservation. Being able to provide the Inland Revenue with copies of valid Gift Aid Forms at audit time will prevent any possible claim for a refund of the Gift Aid income.
- Database verification. The scanning and validation process will confirm that the information about individual supporter donations have been correctly processed and recorded.
- Positive identification of missing forms and Donors. The data captured from the form can be matched against your supporter database so if any forms are missing then action can be taken to ask those supporters to sign a new declaration also, any Registered supporters who have no form can also be identified.
- Additional revenue from previously unclaimed donations. We can identify forms from other charities that have not been processed correctly. This means previous claims for tax rebates can be requested from the Inland Revenue. Charitable organisations have reported that income generated from this exercise more than covers the cost of the project.
- Online hosting: All scanned and electronic files are hosted on a UK based portal enabling secure, instantaneous access to all documents.
In addition to the above, you may wish to consider other departments with similar document challenges who could also participate and obtain cost savings, for example:
- Accounting records
- Child and data protection records
- Grants applied and received
- Membership forms
- Minutes from meetings
- Research and questionnaires that help support decisions
- HR