ReadSoft Forms technology helps reduce Charity’s admin costs

Admin resource is costly

Every Charity wants to be able to distribute as much of their donated funds as possible to their cause, so keeping admin costs under control makes good economic sense. Donations generate a lot of paper and this has to be processed. It is inevitable that a proportion of funds has to be allocated to cover associated admin costs.

Compliance

Charities have to be fully compliant and transparent, corners can’t be cut. Every bit of donation information has to be traceable and accounted for. A management system is the easiest way to manage information …… once the data is ‘in-there’.

Gift Aid forms generate a lot of paper

Charities encourage donations via Gift Aid, a scheme which enables the charity to claim back £2.50 in every £10 donated by UK Tax payers from HMRC. It requires the person making the donation to fill in a Gift Aid form with their details. So as well as additional revenues, Gift Aid brings in a lot more paperwork for the Charity to deal with.

Gift Aid also creates more ongoing ‘paperwork’. Tax repayment claim forms have to be accurately submitted to HMRC in order to receive the additional funds. Any discrepancies cause delays. These could lead to unnecessary hardship for the charities’ recipients, so data accuracy is fundamental in order to get it right first-time.

Manual data entry is laborious and inaccurate

All inbound donation data needs to captured, which means employing a team of data entry staff to manually key the information into the management system. This is a time consuming and inexact process (human error is always going to compromise the accuracy of data) which does not easily cope with huge peaks in workload.

Charity week means even more paper to process

During Charity Week – an annual awareness week designed to market, educate and encourage more people to consider giving money – donations soar. This creates huge volumes of paperwork. The only way around this is to take on extra staff to cope, which immediately starts to erode into donated funds.

Apart from the additional cost, temps are often unfamiliar with systems; adding to the error risk and further problems down the line.

ProcessFlows, with partner ReadSoft, solved the manual data entry problem for a large UK charity

‘Hands-free’ data capture technology – ReadSoft Forms – was integrated with scanning hardware, to replace the Charity’s manual data entry process.

The solution removes the need to manually input data into the management system … and copes with huge increases in volume without a glitch.

It automatically extracts information from scanned images of individual forms and then seamlessly uploads the data directly into the management system.

Admin costs reduced

The result is a 25% saving on the cost of getting all the information contained in donation paperwork into their management system, with the added bonus that data accuracy has been vastly improved, so the Gift Aid tax reimbursement process is trouble free and quicker.

Click here to read the full case study.

Want to know more?

Contact us enquiries@processflows.co.uk or 01962 835053.