How it works
Four steps from your donation export to a schedule you can attach to your Charities Online claim. Nothing is uploaded at any point.
Export your donations
Save your donations as a CSV file. That might be your own spreadsheet, or a download from Stripe, PayPal, SumUp or your bank's online banking. Our export guide shows what to look for in each.
Load it and check the columns
Open the checker and choose your file. It recognises common exports and matches the columns for you. Check the matches and change any that are wrong.
Review what we found
The checker lists every donation that HMRC would reject or query, with the reason and the fix. Simple things, like spacing in postcodes and full stops in titles, are tidied automatically and shown so you can see what changed. Things only you can know, like a missing house number, are flagged for you to fill in from the donor's declaration. Small donations of £20 or less with no name can be grouped into aggregated lines, following HMRC's rules.
Build the HMRC file
With a licence, the checker fills in HMRC's own schedule template (you choose the Excel or LibreOffice version, to match what you use) and saves it as an .ods file. If you have more than 1,000 donations it splits them across several files, one per claim. You then log in to Charities Online and attach the file to your claim as normal.
How long it takes
In our own test with a 500 row file, reading, checking and building the schedule took about one second. Most of your time goes on checking the column matches and fixing anything the checker cannot fix for you. More on why it is worth it.
What is inside the file
- HMRC's published template, downloaded from GOV.UK, with only the donation rows and the claim boxes filled in. Every other part of the file is left exactly as HMRC made it. See what goes in each column.
- The worksheet keeps HMRC's name for it, R68GAD_V1_00_0_EN, which Charities Online relies on.
- Dates in DD/MM/YY format, amounts as plain numbers with two decimal places, and the earliest donation date in the box at the top.
What you still do yourself
- Hold a valid Gift Aid declaration for every donation you claim.
- Check the finished file looks right before you upload it.
- Log in to Charities Online and submit the claim.