The newly available service pack for donorflex is an extremely important milestone.

It will enable donorflex users to seamlessly handle the new 20 per cent standard rate of income tax that becomes effective on Sunday, April 6, 2008.

Clients can pick it up from the public download area at www.donorflexsupport.co.uk, using your new User ID and password. Before you do, there are three key points to keep at the front of your minds:

• First and foremost, when you run the GA service pack, you will not have to worry about making a manual tax-rate change in the Configure donorflex area of the system. The service pack will do that automatically for you. This is contrary to the advice offered to delegates at the recent Regional User Group meetings, which ran before the recent Budget caused us to revisit our plans for the tax-rate change.
• The second point is this. The tax arising from Gift Aid records that are created for donations received on or after that day will be calculated at the new rate of 20 per cent and will be worth an extra 25 pence for every pound to you.
• Third, the tax arising from Gift Aid records that are created for donations that pre-date April 6, 2008, will continue to be calculated at the previous 22 per cent rate and, thus, will be worth an extra 28 pence in the pound to you.

Therefore, the opportunity still exists for you to exploit the gold mine of old donations and their potential for Gift Aid, by urging supporters to give you back-dated Gift Aid declarations!

• What about the Budget bombshell?
  

The most important thing to remember from the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget announcement is this:

Whatever you claim at the new 20 per cent rate, the Government will top it up with the transitional relief, boosting the total repaid back to the previous 22 per cent rate. This will stay in effect until 2011.

When your organisation receives the Gift Aid repayment from HMRC, we suggest that you record the tax repayment as you do now, using the donorflex facility to apportion the tax back to the original donor.

• How should we record transitional relief?

HMRC's view is that it isn't from the tax system and should be recorded as a lump sum against a record created in donorflex specifically for this purpose we'd suggest HMRC INTERIM RELIEF.

• Is our RUG advice still valid?
  

You might remember that the spring 2008 Regional User Group meetings included a special Gift Aid session that was specifically geared towards helping you:

• Plan for April 6's tax-rate change, and
• Exploit the depth and power of donorflex to counter the effects of the change on your fundraising

The content of the session was detailed in a special Gift Aid Countdown document. Until Mr Darling's Budget bombshell, this was available for download from the Documents page on the password-protected Client Area of www.donorflex.com

We withdrew it immediately, to make sure that it still provided valid information and advice. As soon as we concluded our checks and amendments, we made it available again.

Finally, a repeat of our earlier reassurance. When you run the Gift Aid service pack, you won't have to worry about making a manual tax-rate change in the Configure donorflex area of the system. The service pack will do that automatically for you.