The Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (SDS) allows you to reclaim tax on certain donations without the need for the donor to sign a gift aid declaration - more details can found on the HMRC website. 

Important - from time to time the rules of the scheme change so you should check with HMRC - at the time of writing the key rules were you can claim as follows- but you should check the current rules before making a claim

• On cash donations of £30 or less
• On contactless card donations of £30 or less collected on or after 6 April 2019
• From 6 April 2016, you can claim up to £2,000 in a tax year or £1,250 for earlier years

The Gift Aid claim process allows you to submit your Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme for up to and including the tax year previous to the current tax year. This means you can not claim an amount that falls within the current tax year. Instead this would need to await the close of the tax year and then be submitted.

Identifying Eligible Donations

You might want to add a new constituent to add these transactions against for example you could have a constituent called Collection Box or you could add anonymous donations 

We recommend you create a payment method(s) for donations you may claim under SDS - this makes it easier to avoid them appearing in your standard gift aid claim - for example if you SDS donations come from collection boxes, or cash collections create payment methods for these and mark them as not eligible for standard gift aid claim - e.g.

You will need to add a transaction list to determine the value of eligible donations in a given tax year - the filters you would use for the list would be as follows

• Type equals Allocation
• Gift Aid Status Is Empty
• Allocation Amount less than or equal to 30
• Date Paid is greater than or equal to start of the tax year e.g. 6/4/2019
• Date Paid is less than or equal to end of the tax year e.g. 5/4/2020
• Product equals donation
• Payment Method equals Collection Box

This is an example filter

If you have more than one payment method you should enclose them in brackets and use or 

You can download or create a report from your list to total up the transactions.

Reclaiming the Tax 

You should make a claim when 

• The total of the eligible donations exceeds the maximum allowed, or
• You have received all donations for the tax year

You can run your list as often as you like to determine when you want to claim, often people do this at the end of the tax year. When you are ready to claim download your list or create a report from it so you can keep a record of the donations in your claim.

Under Financial | Gift Aid - see example below - you enter

• the value of the eligible donations you have received - important if the value of donations is higher than the limit allowed by HMRC you should enter the limit rather than total amount
• the tax year you want to claim for

The small donation scheme claim will be submitted alongside the main gift aid claim

Ready to Claim

When your claim moves from active to ready to claim you will see a message confirming the details of your SDS claim.

Small Donations Scheme claims & Previous Claims

When you view the details of a previous claim any small donation scheme claim information will be shown in the status message - as shown below.