Receipting is the part of fundraising where a small mistake becomes a compliance problem. A donor claims a credit, the CRA reviews it, and the receipt has to stand up. Most of the errors below are not carelessness — they are the natural result of building receipts in a word processor.
This is a plain-language summary, not tax advice. The authoritative source is the CRA’s own guidance for registered charities, and if you are unsure about a specific gift, ask them or your accountant.
What must appear on a receipt?
Every official donation receipt for income tax purposes has to carry a specific set of elements. Missing one invalidates the receipt.
- A statement that it is an official receipt for income tax purposes
- The registered name and address of the charity, as recorded with the CRA
- The charity’s registration number
- A unique serial number
- The place or locality where the receipt was issued
- The date the receipt was issued
- The date the gift was received, or the fiscal year in which it was received
- The donor’s full name, including middle initial for individuals
- The eligible amount of the gift
- The name and website address of the Canada Revenue Agency
- The signature of an individual authorised by the charity
- A description of any advantage received, and its value
For non-cash gifts there are extra requirements: a description of the property, the name and address of the appraiser if one was used, and the fair market value at the time of the gift.
When can a charity not issue a receipt?
This is where most of the confusion sits. A receipt requires a gift — a voluntary transfer of property with no expectation of return beyond an acknowledged advantage. Several common situations are not gifts.
- Services. A volunteer’s time is not property, so donated services cannot be receipted. The workaround is a “cheque exchange”: the charity pays for the service, the provider donates the fee back, and both transactions are real.
- A pledge. Nothing is receipted until the money actually arrives.
- The purchase price of an item at fair market value. If someone buys a $40 ticket to an event worth $40, there is no gift.
- Gifts where the donor cannot be identified. Cash in a collection tin cannot be receipted to anyone.
- A gift of a right to use property. Lending a venue is not a transfer of property.
How does the advantage rule work?
If a donor receives something in return — a meal, a ticket, merchandise, recognition of measurable value — that is an advantage, and the eligible amount of the gift is the fair market value of the gift minus the value of the advantage.
A worked example. A supporter pays $250 for a gala ticket. The meal costs the charity $80 and there is a $15 gift bag. The advantage is $95, so the eligible amount is $155, and the receipt must state both the total and the advantage.
There is a de minimis threshold: if the advantage is the lesser of 10% of the gift or $75, it can generally be ignored. And if the advantage exceeds 80% of the value of the gift, there is generally no gift at all and no receipt can be issued.
What are the five most common mistakes?
- Receipting the full ticket price for an event. The advantage has not been calculated, so the receipt overstates the eligible amount.
- Receipting donated services. Common, understandable, and not permitted.
- Duplicate or reused serial numbers. Usually the result of a spreadsheet where the counter was reset or two people issued receipts in parallel.
- The wrong legal name or a stale address. The receipt must carry the name registered with the CRA, not the operating or campaign name.
- No description of the advantage where one existed. Even when the advantage is correctly deducted, it has to be described on the receipt itself.
A sixth, which is less a compliance failure than an operational one: issuing a replacement receipt without marking it as a replacement and voiding the original.
What changes for recurring gifts and annual consolidated receipts?
A charity may issue one consolidated receipt covering all gifts from a donor in a calendar year, which is usually the right answer for monthly donors — twelve receipts for $25 each is a poor experience and twelve chances to make an error.
A consolidated receipt still needs every required element, and it must either list the individual gift dates or state the fiscal period covered. If any gift in the period carried an advantage, that has to be reflected.
The practical requirement is that your system can hold gift-level detail and produce a period-level receipt from it. That is difficult in a spreadsheet and straightforward in software that was designed for it.
Where this usually goes wrong operationally
The compliance rules are not the hard part. The hard part is that receipting is a process that has to run reliably every time, usually operated by one person who has four other jobs.
The failure mode is rarely a misunderstanding of the advantage rule. It is a gift recorded in one place, a receipt issued from another, a serial number tracked in a third, and no single view of which gifts have been receipted and which have not. That is a system problem, and it is solvable.