Online Gift Aid Submissions in The Raiser's Edge - Checking Data Integrity

Following on from last week's post confirming Online Gift Aid submissions can be sent using The Raiser's Edge UK version 7.92.5508 Patch 12 (and any more recent versions), I wanted to touch on some of the checks that you can do before submitting your claim.  It is important to ensure that the data you have is accurate to prevent submission HMRC Submission failures.

Here are a few tips and tricks on things you can check:

1. 
   
2. Ensure the charity claim reference number entered in Config > General is accurate.
   
3. Ensure that all submission credentials entered in Config > HMRC Submission Settings are up-to-date.
   
4. Check that you have data entered into each of the constituent fields that are submitted during the claim.  For your query criteria, you may wish to use something along the lines of the following:
   
5. This will identify any constituent records which do not have the minimum required information, which would cause online submissions to fail.  If you want to look over your entire database, rather than check this for the particular claim, simply remove the Tax Claim Number from the query filters.
   
6. Do some additional postcode checking.  UK postcodes always begin with a letter and contain between 5 and 8 characters, depending on whether a space is entered - these are checks you can carry out using query.  You can use the following as your starting place:
   
7. This will check for constituents with postcodes starting with a number, or with 3, 4 or 9 character-postcodes.  If you are checking the entire database rather than a particular claim, remove the Tax Claim number from the filters.  You may also wish to add an additional filter to look only at UK records, since international postcode formats can vary.
   

Note that these are just a starting place.  Don't hesitate to add some recommendations in the comments below.

For more info, please see BB743682.