Member Article

Hospice receives five-figure boost thanks to Nisyst

St Peter’s Hospice will add a five-figure sum to its annual funds thanks to the introduction of Gift Aid collection system for donations that are sold as ‘rag’.

Bolton-based specialist charity EPoS (Electronic Point of Sale) provider, Nisyst, developed the innovative Gift Aid on Rag (GAoR) functionality as part of its CHARiot EPoS system for charity retailers. St Peter’s Hospice runs CHARiot software in its 50 stores and has been using the free add-on feature since its introduction in March 2016.

Caring for more than 2,670 patients each year as well as supporting family members, the charity needs to generate enough funds to continue supporting its patients, costing around £19,000 every day.

Paul Chivers, head of retail at St Peter’s Hospice said: “Before Nisyst introduced the new feature, we didn’t have a system in place to claim Gift Aid on items marked as rag. CHARiot’s GAoR solutions has been fundamental in maximising our revenue and we’re expecting that within a year of its launch it will have paid for more than a full-day of our operations. This equates to going from zero income to around £25,000.

“I only see this figure growing year-on-year as our staff and volunteers become more familiar with the process.”

The new system is HMRC recognised, ensuring that all Gift Aid captured can be fed into the charity’s revenues. Staff and volunteers can operate the software by using a hand held scanner in the stock room to scan the barcodes specifically for rag bags that are being collected on that day.

Any rag donations that have been Gift Aided by the donor are eligible for the full 25 per cent of the sale price in Gift Aid, but the fluctuating price of rag and the varying levels of rag collected each week make it notoriously difficult capture this revenue.

The rag price for that day is programmed into the EPoS system by the team at the charity’s head office, ensuring that any shop in their network processing rag that day does so at the correct price per kilo, allowing all Gift Aid on rag to be captured in an HMRC-compliant manner.

Dave Chunilal, technical director at Nisyst, added: “St Peter’s Hospice is a testament of our team’s dedication to helping charities across the UK to generate more revenue. We’re constantly investing in product development based on user feedback to ensure that it continues to offer users the most advanced functionality – which is how GAoR was born.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Nisyst .