by johnt
4. November 2011 13:48
Charities take your donation - which is money you've already paid tax on - and reclaim the basic rate tax from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) on its 'gross' equivalent - the amount before basic rate tax was deducted. Basic rate tax is 20 per cent, so this means that if you give £10 using Gift Aid, it’s worth £12.50 to the charity.
In order to make a Gift Aid donation a Gift Aid declaration needs to be completed which must include
• your full name
• your home address
• the name of the charity
• details of your donation, and it should say that it's a Gift Aid donation
Some charities are missing out on collecting Gift Aid at tills, because customers are required to fill in their name and address details, particularly when there is a queue it is easy to understand the staff’s reluctance to get the details.
However the solution is to integrate postcode lookup with the till technology, this has been done successfully by a number of charities, reducing the number of key strokes required to input the address details and ensuring that the address details are postally correct.