Donations and Gift Aid

If your campsite is a registered charity, HMRC adds 25p to every £1 a UK taxpayer gives you, as long as you hold a Gift Aid declaration from them. The Donations page (for anybody who can see money) keeps the donations, the declarations and the claims together.

Set-up. An owner or leader gives the charity’s name as registered — it goes on every declaration — and, if you like, switches on the online declaration link to share on your donations page or as a QR code by the honesty box.

Declarations. Donors can make their own online: name, home address (HMRC needs the house name or number and the postcode) and a tick against the declaration wording, which covers their donations from then on and from the past four years. They get a copy by email if they give an address. You can add paper declarations yourself, and verbal ones — but a verbal declaration doesn’t count until written confirmation has been sent, so the page asks you to email it or record the date you posted it. The exact words each donor agreed to are kept with their declaration, and a cancelled declaration stops covering donations from the day it was cancelled.

Donations. Record each one with who it came from, how and when, and optionally the booking it came with. Each shows whether Gift Aid can be claimed on it, and if not, why: no declaration, a verbal one still waiting for its confirmation, or too old (claims have to reach HMRC within four years of the end of the tax year). Gift Aid is only on an individual’s own money, freely given: a booking payment isn’t a donation, and nor is money from a Scout group’s or a company’s funds — record those with no Gift Aid.

Claiming. Make a claim gathers every donation that can be claimed, oldest first, up to HMRC’s 1,000 a schedule, so nothing is claimed twice. Download it: the columns are in the order of HMRC’s Gift Aid schedule spreadsheet — title, first name, last name, house name or number, postcode, aggregated donations, sponsored event, date (DD/MM/YY) and amount. Copy the rows into HMRC’s own template (paste as values) and submit through Charities Online. Check against HMRC’s current template before your first claim, in case they have changed it. Mark the claim as sent; if HMRC refuses it, clear that and undo the claim, and its donations go into the next one.

It doesn’t aggregate small donations into one line, and it doesn’t cover donors outside the UK or the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme. HMRC expects declarations to be kept for six years after the accounting period they were used in; nothing here is ever deleted automatically.