560 million reasons we built Givr

The number nobody wants to talk about

That conversation stuck with me. So I started asking other church finance teams the same question. Treasurers at Methodist chapels. PCC members at parish churches. Leaders at independent congregations across England and Scotland. Most gave me the same blank look.

Turns out, there's a reason. The UK government reckons that roughly £560 million in Gift Aid goes unclaimed by UK churches every single year. Not misdirected. Not lost to bad administration. Simply never claimed at all. That's money sitting with HMRC that belongs to congregations but never makes the journey from the tax office back to the church account.

When you see that number in isolation, it's abstract. A stat. But when you start multiplying it out: that's 2,000 churches at £280,000 each. Or 5,000 churches at £112,000 each. Or one ordinary suburban congregation leaving somewhere between £8,000 and £15,000 on the table, year after year, because the process to claim it is so cumbersome that nobody quite gets around to doing it properly.

Why the spreadsheet became the enemy

I asked that Guildford treasurer why she didn't just submit claims more often. She laughed. 'To HMRC? Have you seen their forms?'

I had. The Gift Aid declaration process, from a church's perspective, is baroque. You need to capture declarations from donors. Store them securely. Match them against your giving records. Batch them properly according to HMRC rules. Then log into Charities Online, fill in forms that seem designed to defeat you, and submit them quarterly or annually. If you get it wrong, HMRC comes back with queries. If you miss a deadline, you miss a tax year. Most small churches don't have a dedicated finance person, let alone someone trained in HMRC protocol.

So what happens? Treasurers do what that woman did. They keep it simple. They collect what they can, record what they must, and leave thousands in unclaimed tax relief sitting in the government's account because the friction of claiming it is just too high. Nobody's being negligent. The system is just genuinely difficult.

Building Givr meant solving the real problem

When we started designing what became Givr, we didn't begin with the question 'How do we help churches give people a nice app?' We began with this: what if claiming Gift Aid was actually easy?

Not the giving bit. That's not really the problem. Most churches have collection plates or card readers. The problem is the claim. So we built backwards from HMRC's requirements. Automated Gift Aid declaration capture from the moment someone gives. Secure storage. Intelligent batching. Direct submission to Charities Online. No paperwork. No quarterly guesswork. No treasurers spending three hours on spreadsheets.

A congregation member scans a QR code in the church hall or on a service sheet. It opens in their phone browser. They give in about 15 seconds. They tick a Gift Aid box if they're a UK taxpayer. That's it. The gift, the declaration, and the donor's consent to claim are all captured in one moment. We handle the rest: matching, batching, submission.

The other thing we solved was the setup friction. Churches don't want to deal with FCA licensing or complex onboarding. We integrated with Stripe Connect Express, so a church treasurer can sign up, verify their bank account, and go live in about ten minutes. The regulated payment bit is handled properly, by Stripe. We just handle the giving, the Gift Aid, and the submission to HMRC.

What that £560 million actually means in practise

I spoke to a church in Buckinghamshire six months after they went live with Givr. They'd claimed £3,200 in Gift Aid in their first four months. Their treasurer told me she'd never claimed anything remotely close to that in a single tax year before. Not because people weren't giving to the church. They were. The church had always been there. The money had always been coming in. What had changed was that claiming was no longer something you had to remember to do, and no longer something you had to know how to do.

Multiply that across even a fraction of UK churches, and that £560 million starts to move. For many congregations, that recovered Gift Aid is the difference between maintaining the church building, funding youth work, running a food bank, or keeping the doors open at all. It's not about getting rich. It's about a church being able to direct resources to what it actually exists to do.

The Gather tier was built for this exact reason

We built three tiers. Free gives churches a way to start: giving works, they can see their donors and funds on a dashboard, but no Gift Aid claim submission. That's fine if you want to test it, or if your church is very small and does claims manually anyway.

Gather is where the real change happens. It's £25 a month or £245 a year. You get automated Gift Aid declaration capture, HMRC submission handled by us, and GoCardless integration so people can set up monthly giving without any of them needing an app. The platform fee drops to 0.5%, and we charge a 2% performance fee on whatever Gift Aid we claim and HMRC pays you. You only pay for what we recover.

We built it that way deliberately. We didn't want cost to be a reason a church wouldn't claim money that was already theirs. A £245 annual fee pays for itself the first time you claim a few hundred pounds in Gift Aid. After that, we're getting a small piece of the recovery, and your church gets the rest.

What happens when the system actually works

That same Buckinghamshire church came back to us after eight months and said they'd now claimed nearly £8,000 in Gift Aid, and had 23 people set up on standing orders through GoCardless. Their treasurer sent me a message that said: 'I've got my Tuesday evenings back. Someone else runs the youth group now because I'm not spending all my time on spreadsheets.'

That's what solving the real problem looks like. Not a flashy feature. Not building something no one asked for. Just removing the thing that was in the way.