Case study
Soil Association Gift Aid Rescue
FormusPro helped the Soil Association recover £300,000 in Gift Aid in one day by rebuilding their submission process with smart, pre-check validation that ensures 100% HMRC acceptance.
Objective
To provide The Soil Association with a user-friendly and reliable solution to submit their Gift Aid batches with minimal manual effort
The Challenge
The Soil Association had had issues with their previous provider’s Gift Aid solution since it was first implemented in 2021.
The tool built their claim batches in Dynamics correctly; however, it provided no data validation before submitting them.
HMRC are very particular about their data formats so batches of 5,000+ claims would frequently be rejected by HMRC.
The Soil Association’s submission tool did not provide meaningful reasons for HMRC’s rejection response which left their users no other option but to manually comb through each claim in the batch to spot the error(s) and attempt submission again.
About 18 months ago their submission process stopped working entirely and their provider was unable to resolve the issue, effectively locking up 20% of their monthly income from donations.
The Solution
FormusPro came in and rebuilt their submission process from scratch.
We added two new buttons to their Gift Aid Batch ribbon in Dynamics, linked to an Azure function app which performed the heavy lifting.
HMRC provide a local-running development tool to process batches and mimic the validation responses of the live endpoint without submitting the batch to HMRC.
We then containerised that tool and published it to their Azure subscription, allowing them to validate batches using HMRC’s rules before submission.
We then used these validation responses to provide users with either the Id(s) of record(s) that contained invalid data, or the response from the HMRC validation directly, containing information allowing easy identification of the records requiring attention.
Results and Impact
The Soil Association have successfully submitted all their batches to HMRC with a 100% first-time acceptance rate, recouping just under £300,000 worth of gift aid repayments for them in a single day.
Previously (when their submission tool was working) the submission of a single batch could involve upwards of 8 hours’ worth of manual data validation before it would be accepted by HMRC.
Continuous Improvement
Occasionally HMRC take slightly longer to process a Gift Aid Batch after it has been submitted, so the accepted response is not always available after the time-period specified in their acknowledgment message.
This doesn’t happen often but does leave the batch at a ‘submitted’ status leaving users unsure of whether the batch has been accepted or not.
We will be looking to improve the automated retry mechanism when waiting for a success response from these anomaly batches. Until then, we’ve developed a third ribbon button allowing users to manually check the status of a batch after it has been submitted to HMRC.
The solution FormusPro have created has gone far beyond our expectations. We came to them with a brief to simply help us submit giftaid claims to HMRC electronically which is very challenging in itself. A whole new process was developed that utilised function apps and the HMRC local testing service to quickly check thousands of rows in each file prior to submission. This gives us confidence that our data is correct and pinpoints specific errors in the files produced. It’s much easier for us to understand the nature of the problem and exactly which records to amend. Previously, it could take several attempts and hours of combing through spreadsheets to get this part of the process right. We found it a very collaborative and professional experience from end to end and we are delighted with the result. We have also been able to finally reclaim a substantial amount of revenue after eighteen months of little progress, which is critical to the cashflow of our charity.
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