The Thomas Theyer Foundation

The Challenge

Gift Aid is an effective scheme that enables registered charities, like the Thomas Theyer Foundation, to reclaim tax on a donation made by a UK taxpayer. As much as 25p can be made every time an individual donates £1 to the charity. Unfortunately, the complexity of claiming gift aid on donated goods meant the Thomas Theyer Foundation were losing out on substantial funds.

With only an electronic cash register to process transactions, the charity struggled to carry out the process of Gift Aid manually with pen and paper. This meant a time-consuming wait for customers wishing to donate. So lengthy, many customers chose to opt out, resulting in less overall profit for the charity.

On top of this, a manual, paper-based and very basic history record, made the producing and filing of annual tax returns to HMRC somewhat of a challenge. Further challenges faced by the
foundation, included competition from high street retailers, managing and maintaining supporters, and lack of or stretched IT resources.

The Solution

After implementing Vardells’ Retail Connect system, which was installed very quickly, within a single day, and with minimal disruption to the business, transactions are now able to flow directly without any manual intervention. This cloud-based system means that all back office and reporting functions can be accessed from any location, on a tablet or mobile device.

With the Vardells system in place, the foundation can benefit from an easy to use till which captures all of the data in the back office. In fact, the user-friendly operational functionality has proven hugely appealing to staff members of all ages. While the streamlined Gift Aid processes, including the fully automated annual tax return, has helped to ensure minimal disruption to the day-to-day running of the business.

In addition, the extensive back office capabilities of sales, track and traceability, and general forecasting that can all be accessed and produced behind the scenes, without interruption to the front of house shop sales, have proven extremely beneficial to the team.

The Result

With heightened efficiencies, a professional front-of-house appearance not to mention accurate, automated processes, the day-to-day running of the Thomas Theyer Foundation has been greatly improved, reducing the scope of manual processes, such as the recording of Gift Aid, while also minimising the potential for errors.

The Retail Connect system, donated to the foundation by Vardells, works to help charities increase their Gift Aid and retail revenues and enables charity retailers to adopt high street best practises. The Thomas Theyer Foundation hope that their new system will enable them to genuinely fulfil their plans and desires to continue their positive and optimistic work.

“The kindness and consideration of Vardells with the foundation has been incredible. The implementation of this system has massively made life a great deal easier. It has given the Thomas Theyer shop an overall more professional look and feel, hugely increasing our efficiency to work, grow, expand and putting us in a much stronger position for growth in the future”

– Chris Theyer, Co-Founder.