Gift Aid software: what UK charities actually need

Plenty of products advertise “Gift Aid support”. What they often mean is a checkbox on a donation form. That is not enough to claim.

HMRC expects a Gift Aid declaration tied to a named donor, with an address, and a trail of gifts that were eligible when they were given. If your “Gift Aid software” cannot produce that trail, you still have a spreadsheet problem.

The operational checklist

A workable Gift Aid workflow has three layers:

1. Capture — when a UK taxpayer donates, record the declaration (name, home address, confirmation they pay enough UK tax).
2. Classify — mark which gifts are eligible. Not every donation is: some donors are companies, some gifts are from overseas, some are already claimed.
3. Claim — generate an R68 (or the current HMRC format) that a treasurer can review before submitting.

DonorPulse stores declarations next to the donation and, on Pro and Enterprise, prepares an HMRC-compliant R68 file. You still submit the claim — we do not file it for you — but you should not be re-keying names into a CSV the night before the deadline.

What to ask a vendor

• Can a donor make a declaration once and have later eligible gifts attach to it?
• Can you exclude ineligible gifts without deleting the donation record?
• Can more than one staff member review the claim file before it leaves the building?
• Is Gift Aid included in the plan you will actually buy, or locked behind a higher tier?

Those questions matter more than a screenshot of a green “Gift Aid” badge on a marketing site.

Related reading

See DonorPulse features for how Gift Aid sits next to donor records, and pricing for which plans include reclaim.