Maybe collating your payments to send to HMRC once a year was once an onerous process. Manually pulling together your declarations, payers and payments was taking hours of work and things were getting missed. Beacon's Gift Aid claims will help to regain some of that much needed time; it does (almost) all the work for you!
If you don't claim Gift Aid, feel free to skip to setting up your forms using the button at the bottom of the page.
The first thing you need to do then is enable Gift Aid in your account. Switching Gift Aid on in Beacon straight away will likely give a picture of where you might have been missing out. Simply:
Head to your Settings > Gift Aid
Toggle on 'Enable Gift Aid?'
Enter your Authorised Official details (why do we need this❓)
Enter your Charity Details (where's this ❓)
Beacon doesn't only let you claim Gift Aid on payments made through Beacon forms, you can claim on payments made outside of Beacon too. Let's next consider where you could have been missing out on Gift Aid in the past, and use Beacon to find those hard earned pennies!
Where could we be missing something?
Storing old declarations elsewhere
Now, you've likely been collecting Gift Aid for some time already, which means you already have some Gift Aid declarations. Consider adding these to Beacon manually so that:
You have a full audit trail of historical declarations that you used to claim on previous payments
You can use Beacon to find any payments that might have been missed from a previous claim
For example: Mr Smith told you in June 2022 that he was happy for you to claim Gift Aid on any donations he makes to your organisation. He confirms that he has been a UK tax payer for the last 20 years. You successfully claimed Gift Aid on the donation he made in June 2022, but when you imported all of your historical donations, you find that Mr Smith made similar donations in June 2021, 2020 and 2019 that you haven't claimed on. Consider adding a 'Start date' of four years prior to Mr Smith's 'declaration date' and watch Beacon add the previous three payments to a claim!
There are a number of situations just like this one where Beacon might be able to help you find some hard earned Gift Aid that you've been missing out on.
Remember, Beacon will only let you use that person's Gift Aid Declaration if it meets all the criteria, so make you've got all the information you need.
Missing historical declarations
We get it, collecting Gift Aid Declarations for all of your donors is hard. Especially if you're collecting donations and other Gift Aid eligible payments through other platforms. However, Beacon makes it really easy to collect new Gift Aid Declarations via signup forms, and these new declarations can be used to claim Gift Aid on payments that were made pre-Beacon.
We'll look at setting up forms later on in this guide, but once we have, why not consider running a Gift Aid Declaration campaign to fill in any missing pieces in your historical donation data?
Your payment 'types' are wrong
We recommend keeping your list of Payment 'Types' high-level for lots of reasons - but this is a really good one. If you're collecting donations under many different categories and names, you might be missing a whole group of payments that are eligible for Gift Aid.
Once you've worked out which 'Types' of the payments that you collect are eligible for Gift Aid, make sure to go back to your Settings > Gift Aid and select them all under 'Eligible payment types'.
Small donations
If you haven't been claiming Gift Aid on donations under £30 made by either cash or contactless payment, Beacon can help you to do so now.
We're new to Gift Aid
If you're new to Gift Aid, you're setting yourself up to start in the best possible way. Once you've enabled Gift Aid, there will be three main things you want to know about:
The Gift Aid Declarations record type that will now show automatically in your sidebar. Use this to
Collect oral declarations
Collect declarations via Beacon forms (we'll get to this soon!)
Add declarations manually
The Gift Aid Claims record type, from here you can
View all the Payments that Beacon has added to this claim for you
Preview your claim
Submit the claim directly to HMRC with the click of a button
The Payments record type. From here, you'll manage some of the eligibility criteria needed to Beacon to add that Payment to a claim.
So we've now won back the hours of time we were going to have to spend putting together our dreaded spreadsheet for HMRC. Before we getting into more detail, let's look at some other places we can save time first of all.
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