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.
The Soil Association was losing out on vital donation income due to a broken Gift Aid submission system that regularly failed HMRC validation checks… and gave users no clue as to why.
With 20% of monthly donations stuck in limbo, they needed a fix fast.
FormusPro rebuilt their process from the ground up, introducing a pre-submission validation tool using HMRC’s own testing rules. It flags issues before anything’s sent, so users know exactly what needs fixing.
100% first-time batch acceptance from HMRC, recouping £300,000 in a single day.
FormusPro drastically reduced the manual effort required by The Soil Association to resolve invalid data in batches.
Delivered using industry-standard CI/CD processes including terraform, comprehensive automated code tests and front-end tests using Playwright.
To provide The Soil Association with a user-friendly and reliable solution to submit their Gift Aid batches with minimal manual effort
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.
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.
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.
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.
For over 75 years, the Soil Association has worked to transform the way we eat, farm and care for our natural world.
They build real solutions from the ground up. Because the only way to solve the issues facing our world is to understand that they’re all connected… and that food, farming and forestry are a vital part of the solution.
Together, they are a force for nature.
They’ve helped to establish and have ongoing involvement in:
They’re also a lead partner in several programmes that work directly with communities to deliver positive change and hopeful solutions. These include: Innovative Farmers, Sustainable Food Places, Food For Life Get Togethers.
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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To find out about how we create systems around the Microsoft D365 platform or to ask us a specific question about our work with Gift Aid solutions, get in touch.
Tel: 01432 345191
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