Donations, receipts and the quarterly numbers a funder will ask a museum for

How does a donation at checkout differ from a higher admission price?

In every way that matters to a giver and to a tax authority. A gift is added to the order rather than to the admission: it is not part of the platform's fee base, so nothing is charged on it, and not part of the tax base, so no sales tax is applied to it. The whole gift is credited to the museum along with the rest of the proceeds and pays out the same way.

Money folded into the admission price is not a donation at all — the visitor received goods and services worth what they paid, so none of it is deductible and no honest receipt can say otherwise. That is worth knowing before you reach for pay-what-you-wish admission, which bindro does offer within a published band: a generous visitor paying the top of the band has still bought admission, so none of it is deductible, while a low fixed admission with a donation box on top splits the same money into a price and a gift and receipts the gift properly.

Why is no receipt going out?

Almost always because no registered charity number has been saved. Receipts are gated on that one field: with a number, a receipt is issued beside the confirmation for every paid order; without one, nothing is issued at all, because a receipt that quotes no registration is not worth anything to the person holding it.

The reports page says which state you are in, in as many words, rather than hiding the setting somewhere nobody visits. Clearing the number stops receipts immediately, which is deliberate: an organisation that loses its registration has to be able to stop issuing documents in its name the same afternoon.

What is actually deductible on the receipt?

The gift, and only the gift. The receipt states the total paid, then names the donated part as the deductible amount and says that no goods or services were provided in return for it. When the order carried no gift, it says that too — that the whole amount bought admission, that goods and services were provided, and that no part of it is deductible.

Stating the zero case out loud is not padding. It is the sentence a tax authority expects a charity to have given the donor, and a receipt that quoted a whole admission-only payment as deductible would be worse than no receipt at all: it invites the reader to claim relief they are not entitled to, on a document that looks official.

What does the grant and board report contain?

A row per quarter: sessions delivered, admissions registered, visitors checked in, free places given, gross income, money returned to buyers, and net. Underneath it, a breakdown of the non-sensitive questions you ask at checkout — for a museum that means "How did you hear about us?", which is the audience-development question funders ask most.

The money lines are read from the ledger the payouts reconcile against rather than re-summed from orders, so the report agrees with the money page to the cent, and the whole thing downloads as a CSV if your funder wants a spreadsheet rather than a printed page. Health-classed answers — the access requirements box — are excluded from the breakdown by construction, so a funder never sees them.

What does bindro never do for you here?

It transmits nothing to anybody. No filing, no submission, no funder portal, no annual return: the report is a page and a CSV that you send, and every deadline and every form remains yours. Nothing about a donation is reported to a tax authority either — the receipt goes to the giver, and that is the end of bindro's involvement.

It also only knows what went through it. A cash donation box by the door, a grant, a legacy, a shop float and a membership fee taken elsewhere are all invisible to the report, so the numbers are a slice of your income rather than your accounts. Say which slice when you hand it to a board, or somebody will read it as the whole.