How to Make a Retrospective Claim for Gift Aid in The Raiser’s Edge (UK)

As you know, tax can be claimed up to 4 years on gifts that are eligible for claim; review the Time limits for making a claim on the HMRC web site for more information.

Here’s an example: You receive a gift from a constituent where the gift is eligible for tax claim based on your Gift Aid Rules, but the constituent has not yet completed a Declaration, and therefore tax cannot be claimed. The following year, you receive a signed Declaration which confirms that tax can be claimed on all gifts received in the last 4 years and also on gifts in the future, making last year’s gift now eligible.

To ensure this gift and gifts like it are claimed, you would run retrospective tax claims in The Raiser’s Edge. A separate claim should be run by financial year, for example for the 2010 / 2011 tax year the Generate R68 (New Gift Aid) report in Reports, Gift Aid Reports would be run with the date range 06/04/2010 to 05/04/2011. See the “time limits” section on HMRC page How to complete Form R68(i) Gift Aid and Tax Repayment claims for more information on the date ranges to use in this report.

While you do not need to run retrospective claims every time you run a tax claim, especially if you run claims on a monthly basis, it is important that you ensure the retrospective claims are run at least once  before to the end of the tax year to ensure all tax has been claimed.

You may have constituents in The Raiser’s Edge with blank end dates on theirs declaration because the constituent has signed the declaration to confirm that tax can be claimed on all gifts in the future. If you receive a gift from one of these constituents that meets the Gift Aid Rules requirements, then the gift is flagged as eligible for tax claim. If the donor advises you, before tax can be claimed on the gift, that he is no longer a tax payer and has not been a tax payer for some time, including the date when the gift was , then enter the date that the constituent stopped paying tax in the End Date of the declaration, which means the gift will now be not eligible. The Pays Tax field on the declaration would remain as Yes because the constituent did pay tax between the start date and the end date on the declaration.

Before running the first claim for any period, whether it is your current cliam or a retrospective claim, we advise that you run the Update Gift Aid Staus, which will ensure the tax claim eligibility of all gifts is up to date and will update the first example gift as eligible and the second example gift as ineligible. Review the post How to Prepare to run a Tax Claim for more information.

Here are more knowledgebase solutions that you may find useful:

• How to setup Gift Aid Rules
• How to Update Gift Aid Status

You can keep up with us on Twitter by following @bbsupport; take a look at our Twitter Guide for more information.