Christmas card purchases

Karen Mitchell

Hi

When a person purchases Christmas cards from our charity, they pay a total amount and some of that is for Christmas cards, a small portion to postage and a donation. I want to use split gift - would you use Fund to differentiate - eg Christmas Cards, Postage, Unrestricted (for donations)? Trying to find the best way for the team to add gifts (rather than adding 3 gifts to a person's record). Also want to ensure that we don't claim gift aid (UK) on postage and Christmas cards.

thanks

?

Carrie Powell

Hi Karen, What about using the receipt amount? You can indicate how much should be applied to card and postage costs, and any amount over the costs is the value of the donation.

Here's a brief explanation in Knowledgebase.

Faith Murray

Split gifts can be hairy when running reports, because it lists the total gift value for each Fund instead of the partial value. For example, a $100 gift split $25/$75 will show up as $100 in each fund, artificially swelling revenues. You must be able to accommodate this quirk when running reports.

Personally, I would avoid Splits. You have some options, but I don't work in the UK, so your requirements may be different.

• You can enter gifts as separate gifts. (But do you really need to split out postage from card value when posting? Seems a bit overkill.)
• You can use Receipt Amount to distinguish tax-deductible portion.
• You can use Split Gifts but be aware of the reporting issue.
• You can restructure the inward mechanics of your donation system. Many nonprofits offer front-end or back-end “freemiums” (such as Christmas cards) and consider it an operational cost. In this system, donors' gifts count as full donations, while your freemium is paid by the Development Department operational costs, as a gift of negligible tax value to the donor. This only works with “de minimus” gift values: “The rule states that if the total advantage does not exceed $75 or 10 per cent of the amount of the gift (whichever is less), the advantage is not included in the calculation of the eligible amount on the receipt.” (See reference article.)
• Some nonprofits don't list transactional (purchase) revenue in RE, viewing it as donor software, not accounting software. If you truly consider the cards a purchase (meaning the donor does, too), you can record the donation portion only in the donor's record, and then record the purchase separately under an Event record, Action, or other mechanism.

Pat Phillips

Use the Benefit tab in database view. You can split the gift there, easy! Open a new gift tab, and the benefit button is to the right of the Letter drop-down.

Rachel Cavalier

Firstly, I'm not an expert on Gift Aid but I don't know if it would be worth looking at whether you can consider the whole amount given as a donation and if the value of the postage & cards exceeds whatever the limit for it being qualified for gift aid or not. You may or may not just be able to claim Gift Aid on the whole lot? But definitely ask someone who is more familiar with that as I've only had a quick look at the page on the HMRC site.

I don't really know that using the Benefit tab will work, as you want to say that one part definitely can't have GA claimed on it. It certainly wouldn't with the way that our database is set up and I don't think there's anything in the GA disqualification section of the business rules that would take care of it using the Benefit tab.

Split gift could work though - you could have a fund that is specifically for this part of the gift, and include that fund in the GA disqualification business rules as being one of the ones where GA can't be claimed. Alternatively, I guess you could manually set that part in the split gift tab as not qualified for Gift Aid, which I know works though you can't have it be the same fund/campaign/appeal/package and the only difference being Gift Aid qualification - so you would probably still need a different fund.

Rachel Cavalier

Definitely have a poke around in the Gift Aid Rules section of the Business Rules though - it might be that you can allocate the amount you don't want to claim GA on to a particular package instead or if you post more than one gift rather than using split gift, the postage/cards gift could have an attribute that marks that.

Carol Frain

@Karen Mitchell Sounds like we deal with purchase of Christmas cards in a similar way! We enter two gifts on RE. One is the total price of the cards and postage (and has a gift attribute indicating the amount of postage). The other is the donation. We have to do it this way as they have different gift sub-types for our finance team. However it does make it very easy to claim the gift aid without worrying ?