Here is how a Gift Aid claim comes together, and what you still send to HMRC yourself.
Gift Aid adds 25p to every eligible £1 donated, at no extra cost to the donor. The catch has always been the paperwork — declarations, spreadsheets, and manual HMRC submissions that eat into a small team's time.
Declarations are captured as people give. Kayana prepares your Gift Aid claim. You review it and submit it to HMRC from Reports → Gift Aid.
Where most Gift Aid gets lost
It is rarely the declaration itself that trips charities up — it is everything around it. A paper form filled in at an event and never digitised. A donor who ticks the box online but whose details never make it into the right spreadsheet. A claim that is technically valid but missed the submission window because nobody had time to compile it that quarter.
Each of these is a small, understandable gap. Added together across a year, they can represent thousands of pounds in Gift Aid that was legitimately owed and simply never claimed.
“Gift Aid is not extra income you have to earn. It is income you have already earned and only need to collect.”
What Kayana prepares for you
The declaration is captured once, at the moment of giving — online, on a kiosk, or via a card terminal — and stored against that donor permanently, so it never needs to be re-collected for future gifts from the same person.
Kayana prepares your Gift Aid claim from those declarations. You review it and submit it to HMRC from Reports → Gift Aid.
A clean audit trail, without the spreadsheet
HMRC compliance depends on being able to show your working: which gifts were claimed, when, and on what basis. Doing that in spreadsheets means the audit trail lives in someone's memory of which version is current. Kayana keeps that history against every donation, so answering an audit question takes minutes rather than an afternoon of searching.
None of this changes what Gift Aid is. The gifts your supporters already made are still there to claim. Kayana prepares your Gift Aid claim. You review it and submit it to HMRC from Reports → Gift Aid.
