Over the pond, we brits love our underdogs, we love the fighting spirit that the underdog has, and the belief that they may just make it. Partly its down to our lives being a collection of "Nice try" and "It wont happen for you" and us not wanting to celebrate anything too soon, in the insane belief that it might not happen. Well thats my excuse for not putting up this blog post any sooner.
In true David v Golliath fashion the HMRC (the government for those who dont like acronyms) decided to change the Online Gift Aid artifacts a while ago. In true government style they talked of this change for some time, even penciling in some dates. Unlike other projects though this one did actually happen, the tax payers money was spent and the service amended to provide zero benefit to the developers around it. Pretty typical, in fact made even more typical by having a hard switch over date meaning any gift aid online claims attempted using the pre April 6th methods would be simply denied access to the governments new strict "no trainers" policy. What does all this mean? Well in simple terms anyone who tried to make a Gift Aid online submission from the 6th of April probably found the claim being rejected, with no way to correct the issue.
Fear no more, the online Gift Aid extension has been updated and is now compatible with the changes. Whilst we were at it we also added some features that we knew the UK user base would find useful;
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Include the ability to view previous submission responses, nice to now get the HMRC references that you need before they'll talk to you
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Ability to re-submit failed batches, kinda crucial since the system had been broken since April
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Failure reports tidy up, so that you can see why contributions are failing submission and correct them - in effect maximising your claim
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Remove any contributions below 1p value prior to submitting, this may have causing issues during submission of legacy data in system
