Small donations can be claimed under Gift Aid for donations under £30, donated via cash or contactless credit card.
Unlike regular donations, you do not need to provide full donor information or Gift Aid declarations to claim on small donations.
After enabling Gift Aid, payments have a "Small donation?" checkbox. Checking this will flag the donation as a small donation.
Small donations have a different set of eligibility criteria:
On submission to HMRC, Beacon automatically buckets small donations into the tax year (ending) that they fall into as per HMRC requirements. For example:
15th March 2019 = 2019
3rd August 2019 = 2020
3rd April 2020 = 2020
7th April 2020 = 2021
See this page on eligibility for more information.
Note: You can claim on a maximum of £8,000 in small donations in a single tax year (equating to £2,000 of Gift Aid). Beacon does not check this for you - you need to make sure you don't accidentally claim too much.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to split my collection tin / donation bucket into £30 payments?
No! You can still mark a single large payment as a 'Small donation' if it's comprised of small cash amounts under £30. For example:
You empty your collection tin monthly, and this month you've collected £150 in donations. You enter this in Beacon as one £150 donation, and tick the 'Small donation' box on the payment. The payment gets added to a Gift Aid claim ready to be submitted.
If you'd like to track your collection tins in more detail, check out our how-to for managing your tins, buckets, shakers or pots!
What happens if we’ve made a mistake on a submitted Gift Aid claim?
If you’ve claimed too much on a previously submitted claim, then you can make an adjustment to your next claim in Beacon to reflect this.
Let’s say you had duplicate payments and accidentally claimed Gift Aid on a £30 small donation twice. You would have claimed a total of £15 in Gift Aid from HMRC, composed of £7.50 from the correct payment and £7.50 from the duplicate payment. Before you click submit on your next Gift Aid Claim in Beacon, you will see the opportunity to make adjustments as below.
In our Adjustments card, we can enter the amount of our error (in our case, £25) and add any adjustment notes to provide context to HMRC.
Note: Adjustment amounts should always be positive; it is the amount that you've over-claimed.
If you think you’ve claimed too little this is probably because payments that you thought were Gift Aid eligible didn’t meet Beacon’s requirements.
In this scenario, just find the payments that you think should have been claimed, but haven't, and update their information so that it meets the requirements. Once the payments are eligible, Beacon will automatically add them to your next claim.
Check out what makes a payment eligible for Gift Aid to see a list of requirements.