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Gift Aid Management made easier.

G-Porter FAQS

Message change 6 April 2015

The following was stated in an email to software vendors giving an outline of the changes made to submissions (message schema) on or after 6 April 2015:

  1. Gift Aid – It has always been a requirement for charities and CASCs to submit full address details of their Gift Aid donors and people taking part in a sponsored event as part of their Gift Aid claim. The change to the schema improves the validation around the provision of the donor’s postcode to ensure that either a valid UK postcode is included or, where the donor has a non-UK address, that HMRC are notified that the address is non-UK.
  2. Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme – The Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS) was introduced in April 2013 and the legislation allows charities and CASCs to submit claims for a top up payment on donations they have received under the scheme in the tax year in which they were received or within the subsequent two tax years. The first time that such a claim can be made under GASDS for donations received up to two tax years ago will be from April 2015. The update to the schema allows this to take place.
    The amounts that can be reclaimed in a tax year are:
    1. £5000 p.a. from 6/4/2013
    2. £8000 p.a. from 6/4/2016
These changes mean that attempting to make a submission using old versions of the software will fail.



How to upgrade

The upgrade process is simple.

  1. Download the latest G-Porter
  2. Unzip into a new folder
  3. Copy the file GPorterConfig.xml from the old G-Porter installation folder. This includes the licence code as well as your custom configuration.
  4. Use as normal

Possible issues

Reading the data files and submitting the message to HMRC should be a straightforward and easy process.  There is not much that can go wrong but here are a few pointers to help.


Unexpected error on submission
"The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.
Received an unexpected EOF or 0 bytes from the transport stream.
Try checking the Proxy settings."

This indicates that the submission may be using a Transport Layer Protocol no longer accepted by HMRC.

Version 9.1.1109.20 of G-Porter and after forces the use of TLS 1.2 and should solve the issue.


Errors occurred in Gateway
   1:-fatal: raised by [Gateway].[MD5 is not supported, please contact your software supplier.]

This error is raised if an old version of G-Porter is used to make a submission. HMRC used to accept encoded passwords using the MD5 algorithm but that was removed in 2019.

Make sure the version of G-Porter used is the latest version.


Errors occurred in Gateway
   1:-fatal: raised by [System], [Parsing Error : Element '{http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope}GatewayTest' has a value which does not match the fixed value defined in the DTD/Schema.]

The message sent contains elements that are not expected by the HMRC server. In this case the presence of GatewayTest indicates the message has been sent to the test server rather than the live one.


Error 500 - Problem contacting server

This error is raised outside the G-Porter program and is a fairly general server error.

  1. If there is a proxy server between the machine running G-Porter and the internet, check that the credentials have been set in the configuration file.
  2. If the number of records is above around 50,000 check that the compression flag is set in the configuration. The HMRC server will not accept messages over around 20Mb in size uncompressed and will hang.

Program hangs whilst reading file

  1. If there is an error dialog box please contact us with as much information as possible.  It could be a situation that we have not encountered before.
  2. To read and process an extract file containing the maximum 500,000 entries requires around 1Gb RAM.  If the machine running G-Porter does not have sufficient free memory it may slow down and appear to hang.  We suggest you split the reclaim into smaller volumes.

I get an error when submitting just an Overclaim

If you attempt to submit an overclaim adjustment without an accompanying claim you will see the following in the G-Porter status box.


1 row in the overclaim adjustment file was rejected. see file file 'D:\temp\GPorter\GPorter\Output\xxxxxx.csv'
Attempted adjustment of £xx.xx will NOT be made for previous main overclaim as there is no main donation or 'other income' in the same submission
Creating submission...
Donations processed and ready to send.

Please do not close until process finished or poll count exceeded
Claim submitted to Gateway
ERRORS occurred in Gateway:
1:- business: raised by [ChRIS], [Your submission failed due to business validation errors. Please see below for details.]
2:- business: raised by [ChRIS], [You must provide details of the Tax Repayment claim or the GASDS claim or both], Location=[/hd:GovTalkMessage[1]/hd:Body[1]/r68:IRenvelope[1]/r68:R68[1]/r68:Claim[1]]
Finished.


The solution is to include a claim at the same time.


Error occurred in the data during transmission

For example

Gateway Automatic Error notification
Thank you for your electronic submission that was received at 10:51:48 on 29/05/18
Unfortunately, the document could not be accepted as the data was incorrect, and did not pass the input validation.
Error: 4065 Message: Invalid content found at element 'Sur'


If an error like this occurs in MaxMyGift it is best to delete the reclaim entry by highlighting the row on the "Reclaim List" screen and pressing delete.

Element 'Sur' is the surname field so check all surnames for odd characters before recreating the reclaim.


What information is required for an overclaim adjustment using G-Porter

  1. The file containing the overclaim adjustment should just contain one data row. It can contain a header if the configuration has been set to treat the first row as a header. The configuration must indicate which column is the "MainDonationOverclaim" and which is the "Reason"
  2. The adjustment must be accompanied by at least one main donation or 'other income' otherwise it will fail. This is imposed by HMRC and I can only assume that it is easier for them to reduce the reclaim by the adjustment.
  3. The adjustment amount is a single figure so you will have to provide a total if there are multiple individuals involved.
  4. The accompanying reason must be between 1 and 350 characters in length.

The reason should ideally identify the donor and amount which as a minimum is surname, initials, postcode and overclaim amount.
For example a concise reason for an overclaim by two individuals might be:-
    Overclaim:Smith J,CT6 8TG,£25;Kumar S,SW5 7YG,£56


Any other issues or questions

If you experience any other issues or have questions please contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.



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