A donor calls three weeks after your Gift Aid claim went to HMRC. Their £50 gift should have been £20, or the card payment was disputed, or it turns out they were never a UK taxpayer. The gift is already marked as claimed in Altru, and now the record and the claim disagree.
This is one of the fiddlier corners of Gift Aid administration, because two separate things have to be corrected: the revenue record in Altru, and the amount you have claimed from HMRC. Fixing one without the other is how charities end up with reconciliation gaps that surface at audit time. Below is how to think about it and a sensible order of operations.
First, decide what kind of change it is
Not every adjustment has the same consequence for your claim. Sort the problem into one of these before you touch anything:
- The gift went down or was refunded. You claimed tax on money you no longer hold, so you have overclaimed.
- The declaration was invalid. The donor was not a taxpayer, the declaration was missing or incomplete, or the payment received a benefit that disqualifies it. Again, an overclaim.
- The gift went up, or an eligible gift was left out. You underclaimed and may be able to claim the difference.
- A non-financial correction. Wrong fund, wrong appeal, a typo in the address. The claimed amount is unchanged, so HMRC does not need to hear about it, though you still want the claimed history intact.
Why you should not simply edit the claimed gift
It is tempting to open the revenue record, change £50 to £20, and move on. Resist that. Once a gift has been included in a claim, the amount on the record is your evidence of what was claimed. If you overwrite it, your Altru data no longer matches the claim file you submitted, and nobody can later reconstruct why the totals differ.
Depending on your configuration, Altru may also restrict edits to gifts that have already been posted or claimed. How strictly it does so varies by setup and version, so test the specific change in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before assuming either way. Whatever the software allows, the safer habit is to leave the claimed transaction as it was and record the correction as a separate, traceable entry.
A workable order of operations
- Record the money movement properly. If cash went back to the donor, process it as a refund or reversal in Altru rather than an edit, so the original gift and the refund both exist in revenue and in your batches. If the gift amount was simply wrong, a refund of the difference is usually cleaner than rewriting history.
- Fix the declaration if that is the problem. If the donor was not eligible, update or end their Gift Aid declaration on the constituent record so future gifts are not picked up in the next claim. Note the date and the reason.
- Log the overclaim amount. Work out the tax you claimed on the portion that is no longer eligible. Keep a simple running log outside the claim itself: donor, original gift date, claim it was included in, amount overclaimed, and the reason.
- Correct it with HMRC. HMRC lets charities deal with an overclaim by reducing a later claim through the adjustment figure in Charities Online, or by telling HMRC directly if you are not making further claims. Check current HMRC guidance for which route suits your situation; the adjustment route is the common one.
- Reconcile. When the next claim goes in, compare the Altru claim total, the adjustment you entered, and your log. All three should tell the same story.
For underclaims
If a gift was larger than recorded or an eligible gift was missed, correct the revenue and make sure the gift has a valid declaration attached. Whether Altru will include an older, already-dated gift in a new claim depends on how your claim selection works, so run a test claim or a query first to see if it is picked up. HMRC allows charities to claim within four years of the end of the accounting period the donation was received in, so there is usually time to get it right.
Build a query you can rerun
The single most useful thing you can set up is an Altru revenue query that shows claimed Gift Aid gifts with any related refunds or reversals. Run it before each claim. It catches refunds processed by colleagues who did not know the original gift was already claimed, which is the most common way overclaims slip through.
Useful output fields include the constituent, gift date, gift amount, claim status or claim reference, declaration status, and any refund amount and date. Exact field names depend on your query views, so build it once with someone who knows your Gift Aid setup and save it where the team can find it.
Policies that prevent the next one
- Agree who may refund a claimed gift. Route those refunds through one person who also owns the Gift Aid log.
- Add a note on every adjusted record. A short comment explaining what changed and which claim was affected saves hours later.
- Hold recent gifts back from a claim. Some charities wait a few weeks after a gift before claiming it, so chargebacks and quick refunds land before the claim, not after.
- Keep the claim files. Save each submitted claim alongside the Altru report it came from. HMRC can ask to see how a claim was built.
Quick answers
Do I have to repay HMRC straight away?
Generally no. Reducing your next claim by the overclaimed amount is the usual approach. If you have no further claims coming, contact HMRC.
Can I delete a claimed gift that was entered by mistake?
Avoid it. Reverse or refund it instead so the audit trail survives, then adjust the next claim.
Does a change of fund or appeal affect the claim?
No. The tax claimed depends on the amount and the declaration, not on where the gift is coded internally.
