Donation & Donor Register

What this tool does

CM8-175 is a donation and donor register for a charity, a club, a place of worship, a school association or any community group where the treasurer changes every year or two. You record each gift as it arrives; the tool keeps a running picture of what came in, who it came from, how much of it is actually free to spend, which tax relief has not been claimed, and who has still not been thanked.

Everything runs inside this one file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so donor names, amounts and notes never leave the computer you are using.

What counts as a donation

A donation is money or goods given freely, with the donor getting nothing of significant value back. Keep the register to those, and keep everything else out of it:

• Not a donation: raffle and tombola ticket sales, jumble sale takings, bar and refreshment income, room hire, sponsorship where the sponsor receives advertising, and membership subscriptions that buy the member a benefit. These are trading or subscription income and belong in your accounts, not here.
• A donation: a straight gift of money, a gift of goods, a legacy, a grant given as a gift rather than a contract for services, and the surplus a member chooses to give on top of a subscription.

Record the gross gift. If an online platform deducts a fee, enter what the donor gave and treat the fee as a cost elsewhere; netting it off here understates both what the donor gave and what your costs are. One entry per gift received is the honest form. Recording a standing order as a single quarterly or annual total works, but it hides the pattern and makes the monthly chart wrong.

Restricted, unrestricted and endowment

This is the part that gets small organisations into trouble, so the tool refuses to blur it.

• Unrestricted — the donor attached no condition. The committee may spend it on anything within the organisation's purposes, including salaries, insurance and heating.
• Restricted — the donor said what it was for, or you asked for it for a stated purpose and they gave in response. It may only be used for that purpose. Money raised by an appeal for a minibus is restricted to a minibus, even if nobody wrote a contract.
• Endowment — capital that must be retained. Only the income it generates may be spent, and often only for a stated purpose.

Restricted and endowment money sits in your bank account but is not yours to spend. Spending it on something else is a breach of trust that can fall personally on the people running the organisation, and it is usually discovered when the balance looks healthy and the running costs do not get paid.

Write the restriction in the donor's own words and use exactly the same wording every time. The fund summary and the donut group by that text, so "Garden tools" and "Community garden — tools" become two separate funds. If you see the same purpose twice on the chart, that is the cause.

Donors and anonymity

The donor type separates people from companies, trusts, public bodies and legacies, because they behave differently: an individual may generate tax relief where a company does not, a trust usually wants a report back, and a legacy arrives once and never again.

Choose anonymous only when you genuinely cannot identify the donor — a collection tin, a cash envelope, a platform gift with the name withheld. Anonymous gifts are excluded from the distinct-donor count, pooled into one bar on the donor chart, and marked "not applicable" for acknowledgement, because you cannot thank somebody you cannot name. Do not use it as a shortcut for a donor whose name you have not typed in yet: that quietly understates how many supporters you have.

Gifts in kind and how to value them

A gift in kind is goods or services given instead of money — tools, food, equipment, a printer's time. Record what was given and, separately, how you arrived at the figure. The tool will not accept a gift in kind without both.

A valuation needs a defensible basis that somebody else could check: the supplier's published price on the day, a written quotation from an unconnected supplier, a professional valuation for anything unusual or valuable, or the realistic second-hand price for used goods. Keep the evidence with the record.

What is not defensible: the donor's own estimate of what it is worth to them, the price of the item when it was new, or a figure chosen because it makes the appeal total look better. Over-valuing a gift in kind inflates your income, and it can misrepresent what a donor gave — which is worse than not recording it.

Tax relief

Many countries let an eligible organisation recover tax on gifts from individuals, or let the donor claim relief themselves. Whether any such scheme exists, who may use it, which gifts qualify, at what rate, on what base, and what declaration or paperwork the donor must provide, differ entirely by country. No rule of that kind is built into this tool, and none is assumed.

What the tool does is arithmetic. Tick "relief can be claimed" on the gifts you know qualify, tick "relief has been claimed" once the claim has actually gone in, and either type the exact relief amount or leave it blank and let it be estimated at the rate you set in Settings. The "relief not yet claimed" tile then shows what is sitting unclaimed — for many small organisations this is the largest sum of money they are leaving on the table.

Set the rate to 0 if no scheme applies to you. The estimate is a planning figure, not a claim.

Thank-yous and receipts

Two separate things, tracked separately. The thank-you is the human one — a letter, an email, a phone call. The receipt is the formal acknowledgement of the amount and date, which a donor may need for their own records and which a tax claim may depend on.

A donation counts as acknowledged only when both are done. Until then it appears in the "acknowledgements due" tile and in the donor summary, and once it passes the target you set in Settings the register turns that row red. Anonymous gifts are excluded from all of it.

Speed matters more than eloquence. A short note within a few days does more for the next gift than a polished letter six weeks later.

Every figure, in full

Nothing here is hidden. These are all the calculations the tool performs.

Two consequences worth knowing. First, the total value column adds an estimate to a fact; use "total received" for anything that has to agree with the bank. Second, distinct donors counts names, so the same person entered two ways counts twice — the donor summary table is where you will spot it.

Campaigns and appeals

The campaign field is free text and exists to answer one question: did that appeal work? Fill it in on every gift that came in response to an ask, and leave it blank for gifts that would have arrived anyway. Gifts with nothing recorded are grouped into a single bar, so a large unattributed bar is a sign the comparison is not yet worth making rather than a sign the appeals failed.

A campaign is not the same as a restriction. Money can be raised through the winter appeal and still be unrestricted, if the appeal only asked for general support. Do not tick restricted just because a campaign is named — and do tick it if the appeal named a specific thing.

Handing over to the next treasurer

The register is the handover. It should be possible for somebody who has never seen your organisation to open it and understand what money arrived, what it is tied to, and what is still owed to donors — without asking the previous treasurer, who may not be reachable.

Three habits make that work: write the restriction in full rather than in shorthand only you understand; use the note field for conditions, promised reports and anything unusual about how a gift was counted; and export a backup at the end of every financial period and store it with the accounts, not only on one laptop.

Donor records are personal data

A register of names, amounts and giving patterns is personal information about identifiable people, and in most countries it carries legal duties: keep it accurate, keep it no longer than you need it, keep it secure, and be able to tell a donor what you hold about them if they ask.

Practical steps: restrict who can open the computer this is stored on, treat exports as confidential documents rather than spreadsheets to circulate, and if a report has to be shared widely, share the fund summary and totals rather than the donor-level register. Where a donor asks to be removed from your records, keep only what you genuinely must retain for your accounts and delete the rest.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a treasurer's report from whatever the current filter shows: header, headline figures, the four charts, the fund and donor summaries, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it to a committee or attach it to minutes.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as a full-year report, and check the currency on the Settings tab matches the accounts.

Saving your work

Donations, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere, and the natural thing to hand to your successor. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether a gift was really restricted, whether a valuation of goods is defensible, whether tax relief is actually claimable, or whether two spellings of a name are the same person — and every figure it shows depends on those judgements.

It is not an accounting system and it does not produce statutory accounts, a fund reconciliation or a tax claim. Reporting duties, fund accounting rules, relief schemes, receipt requirements and record retention periods differ by country and by the legal form of your organisation. This is an internal record-keeping and calculation aid, not legal, tax or accounting advice.