Christian charity Stewardship has announced the introduction of a new feature to add Gift Aid instantly to charity donations.

The charity, which helps Christian charities and churches to process donations, has introduced the feature to help speed up Gift Aid donations by underwriting the value of reclaimed tax to account holders of the donor advised fund (DAF) when receiving donations.

The charity will be able add the tax relief instantly to all gifts up to £25,000 to its 30,000 account holders, making it available to distribute to causes immediately.

Last year the charity claimed over £10m of Gift Aid from HM Revenue & Customs on behalf of its giving community.

Commenting, Stewardship CEO, Stewart McCulloch said: "One of our goals is to make it easy for Christians to give to the causes they care about. Currently, our givers experience a delay distributing funds to good causes because of the different clearance periods - one for their payment and second for the claimed Gift Aid.

"This makes for a slightly complicated user experience, but our team have been working hard over the past year to find a way to make this simpler and so to improve the giving process.

“This pioneering new feature has been made possible following HMRC launch of online Gift Aid claims, which has dramatically shortened the turnaround time from claim to payment. With average claim processing times now down to a matter of days, from 7-10 weeks, we can deliver an idea, which has been an aspiration for over a decade for our team.”

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