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Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme

11 April 2019

The Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS) allows churches to claim a Gift-Aid style repayment to be received on small cash and contactless donations of up to and including £30 (from 6th April 2019) to a threshold of £8,000 of donated income per tax year per church.

What you need to do now:
You need to make sure you’re keeping the right records. HMRC require you to keep elements of evidence, all of which you should already have in place:

1. To be eligible, Small Donations must be banked at bank or post office branch in the UK. You must keep evidence to show that you have deposited at least the amount claimed under GASDS. So, for example, if after a service you have £250 which is eligible for the small donations scheme, the amount banked must be at least that. In practice, because of cash in Gift-Aided planned giving envelopes it will be higher than that – this is fine. It doesn’t need banking separately.

2. You will also need records showing when the cash was collected.

How do you claim?
Claiming under the Top Up element of the scheme is very simple. You can either claim at the same time as you make a claim for Gift Aid, or you can do it separately, but you will use the same online claims process or the same form. If you are claiming online you will answer Yes to claiming a top up payment for small cash donations under GASDS. A number of other options will then open up, and you should answer “Yes” to the first, that you are claiming a top up payment under GASDS for donations that were not collected in a community building. You would answer “No” to the next two questions, and also to the final question unless you are making an adjustment to correct a previous claim.

More information can be found at the HMRC Website.