Gift Aid

[idmacdonald]

Hi everyone,

I have already posted something on the UK users' forum, but I thought I'd post here as well.

I'm looking for a good way to track Gift Aid in CiviCRM. Gift Aid is a UK-specific thing, but the basic way it works is the following:

Someone sends in a Gift Aid declaration that states that the individual has paid taxes on any donations given to the organisation during the time period beginning <some date> and ending <some later date>. A gift aid declaration can be open-ended, meaning that there is no specific end date and the declaration is valid until further notice.

Now, for every donation received from that individual during the time period(s) covered by the gift aid declaration(s), the organisation can claim additional money (a set percentage of the donation amount) from the government.

So, ideally I would like to track the Gift Aid declarations in CiviCRM and then be able to produce a report (or export) of all the donations for which the organisation can claim gift aid. Further, all the donations that appear in said report should then be tagged in some way so that we know that Gift Aid money has been claimed by the organisation for that donation.

I envisaged using CiviMember to track the Gift Aid declarations, since I think they can be treated as 'memberships'. But I don't see an easy way of creating the report of donations based upon the existence of a Gift Aid 'membership' valid on the day of the donation. Just to make it all a bit more complicated, it is possible to back-date a Gift Aid declaration, allowing the the organisation to claim Gift Aid on donations made before the (back-dated) declaration was filed.

Since I think this is getting long-winded, I think I'll stop here. Has anyone implemented Gift Aid tracking in CiviCRM? Or if not, does anyone have any suggestions on how to do the sort of tracking and reporting that I describe above?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Best wishes,
-Ian Macdonald
 GreenNet

[Donald Lobo]

You can build a custom search to create your "donation" gift-aid report. Your custom search will basically identify all the contributions that have a "gift-aid" membership associated with the contact that is valid and the contribution has not been claimed before

You can also create a custom field for a contribution called "Gift-Aid claimed". Once a gift aid has been claimed for a contribution, you can set this custom field (and the above search would also include this custom field in the query). I suspect the easiest way to set this custom field might be via the "Batch update via Profile" or via an Import. to some extent this depends on your process of claiming gift-aid etc.

Ping us on IRC (http://embed.mibbit.com/?server=irc.freenode.net&channel=%23civicrm&forcePrompt=true) if you want any help or guidance

lobo

[idmacdonald]

Hi lobo,

Thanks for that. I have set up the Gift Aid declaration tracking in CiviMember and have coded a custom search to give me the list of donations for a certain time period for which the Gift Aid money can be claimed. I can see how to then do an import to update the contribution records.

If I could avoid the import to set that custom field for each contribution, it would be nice, but since the client will only do this once or twice a year, I'm not too bothered. Does a "Batch update via Profile" work for mass editing of contribution records? I was under the impression that only contacts can be updated in that way.

Thanks,
-Ian

[Donald Lobo]

batch update via profile will work from a contribution search. make sure you have a profile specifically for contributions that you can select for the update

lobo

[idmacdonald]

Right. I have batch update working from a contribution search, which is great, but what I would really like is to be able to do the batch update from the results of my custom search. But that doesn't seem possible (I get the error 'The contact type selected for Batch Update do not have corresponding profiles. Please make sure that Individual has a profile and try again. '). I've had to code the custom search precisely because the standard contributions search doesn't really do what I want, so the batch update from the contributions search doesn't really help me.

So I guess I'll just have to stick with using the import feature for setting that field after getting the list of contributions via the custom search. Which is not that big a deal...

-Ian

[Donald Lobo]

arghhhhh

custom search plugs into contact search and not other searches, hence you get that error. I'll think about how to make a custom search plug into a component search. hopefully it will not be too hard

lobo

[idmacdonald]

I see.

The custom search seems to work fine for searching through contributions (my custom search is based on a 'SELECT DISTINCT contrib.id') and I can then export the list of contributions to CSV (with more than one contribution per contact in the results) without a problem. But the Batch Update of contributions based upon the custom search results definitely doesn't work.

[marcus.liberman]

Ian, if you are still monitoring this thread, I'd love to get an update on how you got on with your solution for Gift Aid as this is likely to be something that we will need to replicate at some point...

Best wishes

Marcus

[alanski]

Yes this is a crucial feature for UK based charity users.

Is there any more info on this? Would love to see / help right a documented process

alanski

[Donald Lobo]

it is now out! yippee

check:

http://www.nfpservices.co.uk/node/83

lobo

[Michael McAndrew]

More gift aid developments: http://civicrm.org/blogs/michael-mcandrew/make-gift-aid-happen

[Michael McAndrew]

in case you missed it: http://civicrm.org/blogs/michael-mcandrew/gift-aid-civicrm-released

[Chelcone]

All installed and works great so far

Thank you to everyone who made it posable.

Chelcone

[Michael McAndrew]

Great news - did you get the message about the improvements for v2?