Rowanmere Community Trust

Members, supporters, gifts, tax claims, events, volunteers and grants for a small community charity or club.

Download 206 KB16 tables, 20 queries, 9 reports, 6 print templates and 9,909 invented records, dated back from 2026-10-22.

Rutba Data Files with Rowanmere Community Trust, the charity or club sample, open at its print template Donation receipt: a page laid out with the business's own name and address at the head and one of its records filled in, beside the list of the database's tables and how many records each holds — Rowanmere Community Trust in Rutba Data Files, made with its invented records and open at its print template Donation receipt.

Overview

For a small charity or club run by a committee and a part-time treasurer: one database for the people who belong, give, come to events and help out, and for the money that comes in.

Rowanmere Community Trust is an invented community charity in Glasgow. It has about two hundred members who pay a yearly fee, regular supporters who give by standing order, appeals for things like a minibus or a new garden path, a hall where it holds a quiz, a ceilidh or a coffee morning most fortnights, a few dozen volunteers, and grants from a handful of invented trusts and the local council.

The records cover the last eighteen months and run into the coming weeks: memberships due for renewal, events with bookings already taken, the volunteer rota and grant reports still to write. Gifts from people who have made a tax declaration are gathered into a claim each quarter, as a UK charity claims Gift Aid; the current quarter's gifts are waiting for the next claim. Every payment in is also written once in the Income table, so the treasurer can see income by source and by month.

In Rutba Data Files, choose Charity or club on the start screen, then With sample records to look around, or Empty for the same design with nothing in it.

It suits, with small changes

A sports or social club with yearly subscriptions
A local history, gardening or arts society
A parent teacher association
A place of worship with regular givers and volunteers
A community centre or village hall committee
A small animal rescue or food bank run by volunteers

Read on

Tutorial: the everyday tasks: 7 everyday tasks, step by step, each naming what to open.
Tables, fields and relationships: every field of 16 tables, and how they are related.
Queries, forms, reports and print templates: what each one shows, its criteria and calculated columns, and when to print it.

Things you should know

Everything in a sample's records is invented: the business, the people, their addresses, e-mail addresses on example domains that reach nobody, and phone numbers from the ranges kept for drama and fiction. Tax, company and bank numbers are placeholders of zeros.
The dates count back from the day the file was made, and some run on into the weeks after it, as real bookings and due dates do. Made from the Data Files start screen, a sample is dated from that day. Queries that compare with today (overdue, due this week) show more as a downloaded file gets older.
To start empty, choose the same business on the start screen and then Empty: the same tables, queries, forms, reports and print templates, with nothing in them but the Start Here guide.
Your records live in one file on your computer. Keep copies: File, Save As makes one, and a copy on another drive or in your own cloud storage keeps it safe if this computer is lost. Close the database before copying the file by hand.
Every change to the design (a new field, a renamed table) is a numbered step that Data Files keeps, so you can see what was changed and when.
Every payment in is written twice: once where it belongs (a gift in Donations, a fee in Memberships, a booking in Event Bookings) and once in Income, the cash book. The income queries and reports read only Income, so a payment left out of it is missing from the treasurer's figures.
Receipt, membership, ticket and certificate numbers are typed, one on from the last, with a new run each year. The sample gave them in date order; Data Files does not fill them in for you.
A renewal is a new Memberships record, not a change to the old one. Tick Renewed on the old one, or the member stays in Renewals due and later in Lapsed members.
Claimable is set from the declaration in place on the day of the gift. Where your scheme lets a new declaration cover earlier gifts, as the UK's does for four years, tick Claimable on those gifts too.
The claim of a quarter of each gift is written in three places: the Gifts to claim query, the Donation receipt and the Tax claim schedule. Change all three if your scheme pays a different share.
A print template prints every record of its table unless you choose some, so choose the gifts, memberships or bookings you mean before pressing Print.
The trust is not registered for VAT, so Tax Rate in Business is nought and no document shows VAT. Company Number holds the charity number, printed at the foot of each letter.
The volunteer shifts go back further than the other records, so the whole of the last volunteer year (to 31 March) is there to count for the certificates.

Starting with your own records

Start with Business: the trust's own name, address and charity number, which every letter, card and ticket prints. Then the lookup tables: Membership Types (your fees), Campaigns (at least a General Fund for gifts given to nothing in particular), Volunteer Roles and Funders. Then enter People as you meet them, with what they have agreed to be contacted by. After that, record Memberships, Donations, Events and their Bookings, Volunteer Shifts and Grants as they happen, and write each payment received in Income too. Make a Tax Claim when you send one and set each gift's Tax Claim to it. Volunteer Certificates come once a year, after the volunteer year ends on 31 March.

Making it yours

Every change to the design is a numbered step in Data Files, so a change can be seen and undone.

If your country has no scheme for claiming tax on gifts, leave Tax Declaration empty and delete the Tax Claims table, the Gifts to claim query and the Claim schedule report.
If your scheme pays a different share than a quarter, change the 0.25 in the Claim Value column of the Gifts to claim query.
For a club with monthly subscriptions, add a Monthly membership type with Months set to 1, and the renewal queries work as before.
Add a Spending table (date, kind, description, amount) to see income against costs each month.
Add an Event field to Volunteer Shifts, pointing at Events, to see who stewarded each event.
For a parent teacher association, rename Memberships to Families and add a field for the children's classes.
Add a Gift in Memory Of field to Donations if people often give in memory of someone.
Add a Safeguarding Check date to People, and a query of volunteers whose check is over three years old.

Questions people ask

How do I print thank-you letters for last week's gifts only?: Open the print template Donation receipt, choose the gifts in the list (sort it by Gift Date), and press Print. Or open the gift in the Donations form and print the letter from there.
A member has paid but still shows in Renewals due. Why?: The old membership has not been ticked Renewed. Open it in the Memberships form, tick Renewed, and check the new year's membership has been entered.
Our country has no scheme for claiming tax on gifts. Can we still use this?: Yes. Leave Tax Declaration and Claimable unticked, and do not use the Tax Claims table, the Gifts to claim query or the Tax claim schedule. The Donation receipt will show nought for the tax line; take that row out of the template if you like.
How do I see how much an appeal has raised?: Run the query Appeals against target, or print the report Donations by campaign: each appeal with its target, the number of gifts and the total given.
Where do the standing orders come from?: Each monthly gift is a Donations record with Regular ticked, entered from the bank statement. The query Regular givers shows who has given in the last 45 days, so someone missing from it may have stopped.
How do we change the trust's address or charity number on every letter?: Open the Business form and change it there. Every print template takes its letterhead and footer from that one record.
How do I count volunteer hours for a funder?: Print the report Volunteer hours: the hours and their value at each role's hourly rate, by month and role. Change a role's Hour Value in Volunteer Roles if the funder uses another rate.

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