If you claim Gift Aid on your membership subscriptions, Making Music Platform can simplify your admin work through a feature called the Gift Aid Report.
This guide is for groups who are already claiming Gift Aid on membership subscriptions. If your group isn’t then read How to claim Gift Aid for your group to find out more.
If you claim Gift Aid on your membership subscriptions, you can continue to do so when you invoice members through Making Music Platform. Platform will even do most of the work for you in creating your Gift Aid return. This feature is called the Gift Aid Report, and it requires that you have enabled Member Invoicing on your Platform (see user guide: Setting up Member Invoicing).
Setting up the Gift Aid module
First log into your Platform and go to Website Setup and Configuration (click the cog icon in the top right corner of your Making Music Platform).
Click the top ‘Settings’ cog in the table: this will bring up a page titled Making Music Platform Details.
In your Making Music Platform Details, click on the ‘Payments’ tab. Scroll almost to the end of the page, until you see a box labelled ‘Gift Aid allocation’. Enter the percentage of your membership fee that is eligible for Gift Aid (i.e. the % you decided from your tuition calculations.)
Defining whose subs are eligible for Gift Aid
To claim Gift Aid on a member’s subscription that member must have signed a Gift Aid declaration form.
You can record which members have agreed to Gift Aid their subscriptions as part of the individual’s Membership Details. Membership Details are easy to update from your Memberships Administration page (found via ‘Admin’ – ‘Memberships’).
From your Memberships Administration, look for the member whose subs you would like to Gift Aid in the table of members. Click the ‘edit’ icon to the right of their name. You should be taken to a page titled ‘Membership Details’.
Scroll down the page until you reach the subheading ‘Financials’. At the bottom of that section you should see a question: ‘Allocate a percentage of fees to Gift Aid?’.
- Enter in the dates between which the member has agreed for you to claim Gift Aid.
- The ‘From’ date can be the date they signed their Gift Aid declaration.
- If their Gift Eligibility is ongoing – leave the ‘To’ date empty – an empty field means the members is currently eligible for gift aid.
- If the member stops being eligible for Gift Aid update the ‘To’ field at this point.
Payments made outside of the date range that you enter for this member, will not be shown in your final Gift Aid Report.
You will need to input these dates for every member whose subs you intend to claim Gift Aid on.
However, if you give us these dates with your membership data when you apply for Making Music Platform then we can import it for you.
Invoicing members and recording subscription payments
You can read more about invoicing and accepting payments through Making Music Platform above.
The important thing to know here is that in order to create a Gift Aid report on Making Music Platform, you must have at least one eligible payment recorded on Making Music Platform.
Creating a Gift Aid report
Go to your Gift Aid page (found in ‘Admin’ – ‘Financials’ section). Enter in the date range for the subscriptions that you want to include and click ‘show’. If you have any eligible payments, you will see a list of them. You can download this report for your own records: it’s designed to use the formatting you are required to use when making a Gift Aid claim to HMRC.
