As part of our efforts to make integrating with Swiftaid simpler and the onboarding experience for charities more straightforward we have added support for HMRC customer id based referencing of charities when sending in donation information to the Swiftaid API.
Up until now for integrations where Swiftaid acts as a nominee directly for charities we require the integrating platform to define a unique reference format; with each charity customer being prompted for this unique reference when adding a donation source, once this is setup the reference can be used within donations to reference the target charity as so:
“transaction”: {
“type”: “direct”,
“id”: ”your_reference_1”
}
While this method has been used successfully across several integrations it proved a burden to define and manage these unique customer references with charity users sometimes encountering difficulties while trying to add donation sources.
From now charities can be referenced using the unique HMRC customer id they are given when they register for Gift Aid, and as we already request the HMRC customer id as part of the sign-up process with Swiftaid this means the charity will not need to enter any further identifiers when adding compatible donation sources in the Swiftaid charity dashboard. This reference can then be used within donations instead of the direct reference:
“transaction”: {
“type”: “hmrcId”,
“id”: “SA12345”
}
Using this reference method means you no longer need to define and manage unique customer references for each of your charity customers, however you will need to make sure you are asking the charity for their HMRC customer number during your onboarding process if you are not already doing so.
If you send in donation info using an HMRC customer reference that has not warranted your service then that donation will not be accepted, for the sandbox service you can use the HMRC customer id SA12345, which is set as warranted for all clients.
There are no plans to deprecate any functionality around direct references so existing integrations using direct references need not make any changes.