Why use Donor Schedule

25p for every £1

When an individual who pays enough UK tax gives £1 and makes a Gift Aid declaration, your charity or community amateur sports club can claim back 25p from HMRC [1]. So £2,000 of eligible donations means £500 of Gift Aid.

It adds up across the sector. In the tax year to April 2026, HMRC paid charities and CASCs £1.88 billion in Gift Aid, and 67,650 organisations received it [2].

Gift Aid that never gets claimed

Research for HMRC estimated that up to £560 million a year of Gift Aid could have been claimed but was not, because eligible donors did not add Gift Aid to their donations [3]. The Charity Finance Group and the Charities Aid Foundation still quote this figure [4] [5]. The research dates from 2016, so treat it as an estimate.

That gap comes from donors not making a Gift Aid declaration, which no software can fix. What a tool can do is make sure the donations you already hold declarations for are actually claimed, on time, in a file that uploads.

The 4 year deadline

HMRC says you need to claim for a donation within 4 years of the end of the financial period you received it in. For a trust that is the tax year (6 April to 5 April). For a CASC, a charitable incorporated organisation or a limited company it is your accounting period [6]. If a year's donations were never claimed, you can still claim them until that deadline. After it, the Gift Aid is lost. See the 4 year rule.

How long it takes

By hand, you copy each donor from an export or bank statement into HMRC's spreadsheet, split full names into title, first name and last name, fix postcodes, retype dates as DD/MM/YY, take out £ signs, and then check it all again. For a few hundred donations that means hours of copying and checking. Pasting is quicker, but HMRC says copying and pasting into the schedule is a cause of upload errors [7].

With Donor Schedule, you load your CSV, check the column matches, read the list of problems, fix the few that only you can fix, and build the file. In our own test on 20 October 2026, a 500 row file was read, checked and built into a schedule in about one second. Allow a few minutes to check the column matches and look over what it flags. Anything it cannot fix for you, such as a missing house number, still needs looking up from the donor's declaration.

Common mistakes that stop a schedule going through

These all come from HMRC's own guidance and the instructions in its template [7] [8]. The checker looks for each of them.

• The wrong template. HMRC publishes an Excel version and a LibreOffice version, and says not to convert one into the other. Which template to use.
• The wrong file type. The schedule must be saved as .ods, not .xlsx or .csv, and renaming the file ending causes problems.
• A renamed worksheet. If the tab R68GAD_V1_00_0_EN is renamed, you cannot attach the schedule to your claim. Worksheet name.
• Over 1,000 lines. Lines over the limit are not attached to your claim. The 1,000 line limit.
• Dates in the wrong format. HMRC asks for DD/MM/YY. Date errors.
• Postcode and name format. Postcodes in capitals with a space, titles of 4 characters at most, and a space instead of a hyphen in double-barrelled surnames. Postcodes and names and titles.
• Aggregated donations over £20. Only donations of £20 or less can be added together, and each line must stay under £1,000. Aggregated donations.
• Pasted cells and stray spaces. These cause "ASM" and other system errors. ASM errors and blank spaces.

What Donor Schedule does not do

• It does not decide whether a donation qualifies for Gift Aid or check your declarations.
• It does not submit your claim or collect money for you. You attach the file in Charities Online yourself.
• It is not tax advice, and it is not affiliated with, approved by or endorsed by HMRC.