When submitting Gift Aid, a contact's Gift Aid declaration needs to follow a set of rules for the submission to be sent to HMRC.
If any declarations are invalid, Charity CRM will alert you of this when attempting to submit.
Any fixes to problematic data needs to be applied to the Gift Aid declaration or payment rather than the contact it is linked to. This is because data may vary between the two, such as someone using a preferred name on the contact instead of their legal name on a declaration.
List of checks
The list of checks we make are:
The declaration must have a first name.
The first name has a maximum character length of 35 characters.
The first name cannot contain an &, <, or >.
The declaration must have a key name.
The key name has a maximum character length of 35 characters.
The key name cannot contain an &, <, or >.
The declaration must have a house number for the address.
The house number has a maximum character length of 40 characters.
The house number cannot contain an &, <, or >.
The house number cannot start with a carriage return.
The payment must have a date against it.
The payment value must be greater than 0.
The title needs to be one of: Capt, Dr, Earl, Lady, Lord, Miss, Mr, Mrs ,Ms, Prof, Rev, Sir, or otherwise left blank.
For non UK addresses, postcode must be left blank.
Postcodes
For UK addresses, the postcode needs to follow one of a set of formats, which can be displayed as the below, where A is alphabetical characters and N are numerical:
AANN NAA
AANA NAA
ANN NAA
AAN NAA
ANA NAA
AN NAA
Once all data has been corrected you can submit the Gift Aid claim again. If there are any other remaining issues, the system will alert you via the online claim tab.