Whilst Beacon allows you to collect Gift Aid declarations in a wonderfully efficient manner, you may have historic paper Gift Aid declarations you want to ensure are recorded in Beacon, or you may have people come into your offices and make donations face to face.
In these circumstances, you're going to want to add a Gift Aid Declaration manually for those people - and thankfully, it's nice and straightforward to do in Beacon.
How to add a Manual declaration
Go to 'Gift Aid Declarations' in your sidebar and click 'Add New'. Type in the person you want to add a Gift Aid Declaration for. If you don't already have them in Beacon, you'll be able to add them at this point.
You'll then want to complete the relevant fields to your declaration, which are likely to be:
Declaration Date - Date this declaration was made
Start Date - When the declaration is valid from. Going off the standard Gift Aid declaration, this is usually 4 years before the declaration date
End Date - Unless the donor has given you a specific date when payments from them will become illegible for Gift Aid, there is no need to fill this in
Method - Here you'll want to record how the declaration was received
Confirmed? - If the Gift Aid declaration was only oral, you'll want to confirm via email. You can do this through Beacon, with full instructions here.
You can then add additional information such as:
Sponsorship? - Was this declaration from a fundraiser, covering donations they have received?
Cancelled? - Has this Gift Aid declaration been terminated or revoked?
Attachments - Attach your scan or image of a paper declaration here - it'll help you ensure that you're keeping the full record in one place.
Bulk Importing Manual Declarations
If you have a fair number of Gift Aid declarations you'd like to bring into Beacon, then it'll be easier for you to import these after building an Import template. We give you a quick guide on how to do imports here.
If you have digital scans of paper declarations that you'd like to import as well, you can use Beacon's file importer to add those too!