Software/Pledges & Gift Aid
The part built to capture gifts, not purchases.
An auction purchase almost never carries Gift Aid. A pledge is a genuine gift, so it can, and it is worth 25% more to the charity. This is the half of the platform that exists because of that difference.
Pledge tiers anyone can reach
A well-structured pledge runs in tiers — a high tier for guests with real disposable income, and tiers well beneath it, down to a level anybody in the room can afford. Two hundred people can all give, each at their own level, inside the same three minutes.
Add a Pay What You Can option so nobody is excluded by the lowest fixed tier, and the room gives at the shape it actually is rather than the shape you guessed.
Gift Aid, worked out for you
Gift Aid does not usually apply to an auction, because the winner receives goods. That is a purchase, not a gift. But HMRC allows a payment to be split: the item’s retail value is treated as the purchase, and anything paid above that value can be a Gift-Aidable donation.
To use the split you must tell bidders the retail value before they bid, and the item must be commercially available so a real value exists. Benefit limits then apply on top.
The platform does the split automatically, so volunteers do not have to work it out by hand at eleven o’clock at night. Declarations are captured at the point of giving, while the guest is still in the room. The full HMRC rules →
General guidance, not tax advice — check your own position with your accountant.
And then the claim itself, which is the bit that takes an afternoon
Capturing declarations is half the job. The other half is turning them into something HMRC will accept, and that is where the time goes: a spreadsheet in a fixed format, one line per donation, names and house numbers and postcodes in the right columns, dates in the right style, a thousand donations to a file.
The platform builds it. One screen shows every donation waiting to be claimed and what it is worth, and produces the schedule in HMRC’s own column order, ready to attach.
Three things it does that a spreadsheet built by hand at eleven at night does not.
It never claims on the wrong thing
Gift Aid is only ever due on a genuine gift. Tickets, raffle and lottery entries, games of chance and anything somebody bought at auction are all excluded, and eligibility is decided per item rather than per order. So a guest who buys a ticket and makes a donation in the same basket claims on the donation and nothing else.
It tells you what it cannot claim, rather than quietly leaving it out
A donation with no postcode cannot go in a claim. The easy thing is to filter it out so the file looks tidy, and that hides money the charity is entitled to. Those are listed separately with the reason, so somebody can fix the record and claim it next time.
It will not let you claim the same gift twice
Preparing a claim locks the donations in it so they cannot appear in another. Cancelling a claim releases them again. Claiming twice is the mistake nobody wants to explain to HMRC, so it takes deliberate effort, and the harmless one takes a click.
You file it, on your own account. You sign in to Charities Online with your own Government Gateway login and attach the schedule, which is how most charities claim already. We never file on your behalf and we are never between you and HMRC, in the same way we are never between you and your own Stripe account.
General guidance, not tax advice. Check your own position with your accountant.
Regular giving, two ways
A supporter can become a monthly donor by card, set up once and taken automatically each month, cancellable by them from the same page, or by standing order, where the instruction sits with their own bank.
Both carry Gift Aid, and both are managed in one place. It is the most dependable income a charity can have, because it is predictable, and the night you have someone’s attention is the best moment you will ever get to ask.
Also built in
Four more ways money arrives as a gift
Matched giving
A sponsor pledges to match the room pound for pound up to a ceiling, and the total climbs twice as fast in front of everyone.
Four people, one lot
A table wants the £2,000 weekend and nobody wants £2,000 on their own card. Split it four ways and it sells for £2,000 instead of £600. Each payer gets their own receipt, so Gift Aid is claimed per person.
The donor wall
Givers named publicly, which is both a thank-you and a prompt. Tributes and in-memory giving sit alongside it.
Fee cover
Guests can choose to cover the card processing cost so the charity receives the full amount — offered, never assumed, and never a prompt that benefits us.
The thesis, in working form
Let’s talk about your number.
Every mechanism here exists to capture generosity as a gift rather than a purchase.
Book a discovery call→