I work only with charities and most of my clients use Sage. I am also a Xero partner and could easily encourage my clients to move to Xero but for most of them it is genuinely not the best solution - Sage works better. But it does depend on the situation.
You don't pay to be a Xero partner as long as you have at least one paying customer using it, but you have to go above a certain number before you get a discount so it's probably not worthwhile. You also have to keep up with their product updates and take a test. Charities can get a discount for using Xero, either with direct subscription or through a partner.
Suppose your bank statement file contains 5 columns of data in columns A to E: date, description, debit, credit, balance on Sheet1.
Set up another tab (sheet2) with your standard records with their usual Sage posting codes. Column A must contain exactly the same wording as you see on the bank statement description, column B: nominal; column C: department, etc
In column F of your statement data, on the first transaction line (eg. row 2), type the formula =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(B2,Sheet2!A:C,2,FALSE),)
IFERROR just means leave it blank if it doesn’t find a match. VLOOKUP says compare my B2 value on the statement with the description you find in column A of sheet2 and if you find it, return the corresponding value you find in the second column of the range A:C on sheet2.
The 14 day window is new, and not in a good way: “Claims from 1 November 2020 must be submitted by 11.59pm 14 calendar days after the month you’re claiming for. If this time falls on the weekend then claims should be submitted on the next working day”.
Your question has had over 300 views without a response which shows how confused we all are with flexible furlough, but I’ll take a shot. If he’s paid weekly and genuinely worked less to start with, it’s fair to claim for that so I would probably exclude the “usual” and “actual” hours for the week he worked more on the basis that he’s not furloughed at all that week. But if it looks like this is going to happen again, well an average is an average so you wouldn’t continue to claim furlough if that’s a typical pattern that would have occurred anyway.
No problem. When you post the initial $2000 it shows as SA, you then allocate $1500 against an invoice which then leaves an SA for $500. The same thing happens again so you now have 2 x SA for $500. When the next $1000 comes in it again shows as an SA. You raise an invoice for $2000. The account is now at zero but the transactions haven't been matched. Post a 0.00 customer receipt which will pull up all the "outstanding" items and you simply match off all of them.
Remember Sage has a demo company you can practise on if you're not sure how things work. Go to File and Open Demo Data.
I completely agree. I've lost clients that have had to close and for those who struggle on I'm doing twice the work for less money, knowing they may not be able to pay me anyway. But if I furlough myself I can't help them at all, even though my non-incorporated peers can continue to work and still get the government grants. It's nothing to do with the salary/dividend issue. I could live with that, but there's a striking unfairness in not allowing company directors to maintain even a little of their business.
As I understand it, the minimum length of furlough is 3 weeks and it appears that staff can move in and out of furlough. So is there any reason why a director couldn't furlough for 3 weeks, then go back for a week to process payroll and catch up with what little work there is, then furlough again?
This puts a slightly different slant on it, but if the attendees all made large donations, you'd need to be sure they met the benefit rules - the item they received must be valued at less than 25% of the donation. Also they'd each need to complete a Gift Aid declaration themselves. If you are relying on the small donations scheme (GASDS), you would be declaring that no one paid more than £30. In both cases, the transaction is between the attendee and the charity, not the organiser.
The consequences of getting it wrong? HMRC can go back to the "donor" and get them to pay back the value of the Gift Aid claimed. The charity would be hurt more. If this donation makes up, say, 50% of the total GA claimed and is found to be ineligible, HMRC will deduct 50% of all future claims on the basis that the charity has inadequate processes in place to prevent this happening.
Hopefully the charity would have been aware of what this kind lady was trying to do and simply ignored the tick box.
If it was advertised as “craft sale in aid of a registered charity” then there was no intention that the lady was trading to make personal gain so the money was never hers to donate, therefore not gift aidable.
I can’t see anything in the original post to suggest that the lady herself made and donated all of the goods and it seems unlikely. If she did, I would agree with your statement, but was it so?
My answers
I work only with charities and most of my clients use Sage. I am also a Xero partner and could easily encourage my clients to move to Xero but for most of them it is genuinely not the best solution - Sage works better. But it does depend on the situation.
You don't pay to be a Xero partner as long as you have at least one paying customer using it, but you have to go above a certain number before you get a discount so it's probably not worthwhile. You also have to keep up with their product updates and take a test. Charities can get a discount for using Xero, either with direct subscription or through a partner.
Suppose your bank statement file contains 5 columns of data in columns A to E: date, description, debit, credit, balance on Sheet1.
Set up another tab (sheet2) with your standard records with their usual Sage posting codes. Column A must contain exactly the same wording as you see on the bank statement description, column B: nominal; column C: department, etc
In column F of your statement data, on the first transaction line (eg. row 2), type the formula =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(B2,Sheet2!A:C,2,FALSE),)
IFERROR just means leave it blank if it doesn’t find a match. VLOOKUP says compare my B2 value on the statement with the description you find in column A of sheet2 and if you find it, return the corresponding value you find in the second column of the range A:C on sheet2.
The 14 day window is new, and not in a good way: “Claims from 1 November 2020 must be submitted by 11.59pm 14 calendar days after the month you’re claiming for. If this time falls on the weekend then claims should be submitted on the next working day”.
Your question has had over 300 views without a response which shows how confused we all are with flexible furlough, but I’ll take a shot. If he’s paid weekly and genuinely worked less to start with, it’s fair to claim for that so I would probably exclude the “usual” and “actual” hours for the week he worked more on the basis that he’s not furloughed at all that week. But if it looks like this is going to happen again, well an average is an average so you wouldn’t continue to claim furlough if that’s a typical pattern that would have occurred anyway.
No problem. When you post the initial $2000 it shows as SA, you then allocate $1500 against an invoice which then leaves an SA for $500. The same thing happens again so you now have 2 x SA for $500. When the next $1000 comes in it again shows as an SA. You raise an invoice for $2000. The account is now at zero but the transactions haven't been matched. Post a 0.00 customer receipt which will pull up all the "outstanding" items and you simply match off all of them.
Remember Sage has a demo company you can practise on if you're not sure how things work. Go to File and Open Demo Data.
I completely agree. I've lost clients that have had to close and for those who struggle on I'm doing twice the work for less money, knowing they may not be able to pay me anyway. But if I furlough myself I can't help them at all, even though my non-incorporated peers can continue to work and still get the government grants. It's nothing to do with the salary/dividend issue. I could live with that, but there's a striking unfairness in not allowing company directors to maintain even a little of their business.
As I understand it, the minimum length of furlough is 3 weeks and it appears that staff can move in and out of furlough. So is there any reason why a director couldn't furlough for 3 weeks, then go back for a week to process payroll and catch up with what little work there is, then furlough again?
This puts a slightly different slant on it, but if the attendees all made large donations, you'd need to be sure they met the benefit rules - the item they received must be valued at less than 25% of the donation. Also they'd each need to complete a Gift Aid declaration themselves. If you are relying on the small donations scheme (GASDS), you would be declaring that no one paid more than £30. In both cases, the transaction is between the attendee and the charity, not the organiser.
The consequences of getting it wrong? HMRC can go back to the "donor" and get them to pay back the value of the Gift Aid claimed. The charity would be hurt more. If this donation makes up, say, 50% of the total GA claimed and is found to be ineligible, HMRC will deduct 50% of all future claims on the basis that the charity has inadequate processes in place to prevent this happening.
Hopefully the charity would have been aware of what this kind lady was trying to do and simply ignored the tick box.
If it was advertised as “craft sale in aid of a registered charity” then there was no intention that the lady was trading to make personal gain so the money was never hers to donate, therefore not gift aidable.
I can’t see anything in the original post to suggest that the lady herself made and donated all of the goods and it seems unlikely. If she did, I would agree with your statement, but was it so?