Canadian JustGiving Users - What to Report To CRA

Sean Eliuk

Hello, I have a question for Canadian users of JustGiving. Earlier in 2025, Blackbaud changed its Canadian receipting format. Previously, voluntary contributions (to cover platform fees) were included in the donation and eligible tax receipt amount. Now, these contributions are treated as “tips” to the JustGiving platform and are not tax receiptable on automated receipts. However, the data sent from JustGiving to RE NXT still includes the voluntary contribution in both the donation and receipting amounts.

How are your organizations dealing with this change? Specifically, are you including voluntary contributions in your gross revenue, and are you tracking them separately for T3010 reporting?

Would appreciate any feedback or examples of how other Canadian charities are handling this.

Aldera Chisholm

To confirm, is the donors automated receipt amount from JustGiving different than the value you are seeing on the receipt amount on the gift when it comes over in RE? That is going to be an audit nightmare.

I haven't played in JustGiving in the last year so I'm not 100% up on their changes. Is Just Giving running the new method like NXT forms where you can choose "Donor Cover" vs "Complete Cover"? If they can't fix the integration to have the receipt amounts align, I personally wouldn't use them.

Sean Eliuk

Hello,

Thank you for reading my post and responding. To answer your question, yes the 2 amounts are different. The auto generated receipt from JustGiving is for the donation amount, excluding the Voluntary Contribution, but what comes int RE is the full amount including the Voluntary Contribution. so yes it gets a bit confusing.

Aldera Chisholm

I checked out their help files on this - very oddly phrased. They say that if a donor gives $100, and chooses to cover the $5 fee, JG "tops up" the donation to $105 in their system. You then get charged the CC usual fees, but don't get the $5 top up, so you should be getting $100 less CC fees. In that case, yes, I see that the donor is getting a receipt for $100, but it is a sketchy way to set this up!

So, for a $100 gift, you should have the JG show up as $100 gift and $100 receipt value, and the fees of $2.99 or so are handled in the backend by finance the same as any other CC transaction. If the $105 is showing as the gift amount, and $100 in receipt amount (or any other combo of numbers) then yes, CRA will have a problem with that at Audit time, and your reconciliation will be a mess.

Long story short, the voluntary contribution is a CRA receiptable amount IF you are receiving it - if you aren't receiving it, and its something like a split gift at JG side - donor CC is charged $105, $5 to them, and $100 to you, then $100 is the amount for CRA. Are you importing these or are they automatically coming over?

Ali

Sean Eliuk

Hello,

These JustGiving transactions get automatically sent to RE NXT Web View. In your illustration of $100 donation with $5 voluntarily contribution, JG will send $105 as the gift amount and the receipted amount to RE NXT (while the actual receipt only shows $100).

Aldera Chisholm

Ouch, yeah, that's going to be a problem for reporting! I'm not sure what I would recommend on this - but I think you'll have to loop in someone from finance/audit to see how they want to tackle it on that end.

Sean Eliuk

Hahahahaa yes quite a problem. thank you for your advise. We have started having discussions.

Aldera Chisholm

Interesting note, @Sean Eliuk, I saw today in LinkedIn a number of articles from the UK about push-back on Just Giving's tip methodology. We don't have the same rules here, but it's interesting to follow this discussion, and see how it may impact us in the future: https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/regulator-to-tighten-fundraising-platforms-zero-tip-rules-from-next-month.html

Sean Eliuk

Thank you. I will go read the article at the link.