A plain-language guide to CRA-compliant donation receipts

If you administer a Canadian registered charity, donation receipts are one of the few places where a small clerical habit can become a compliance problem. The rules are not complicated, but they are specific, and the CRA’s own guidance is written for auditors rather than for the person issuing a receipt at nine o’clock after a fundraising dinner.

This is the plain-language version: what has to be on a receipt, what a serial number is for, how split receipting actually works, and how to fix a receipt you got wrong — because you will, eventually, and fixing it wrong is worse than the original mistake.

What the CRA actually requires

An official donation receipt for a cash gift must carry all of the following. Not most of them — all of them:

• A statement that it is an official receipt for income tax purposes.
• Your charity’s name and address, as recorded with the CRA.
• Your registration number (the business number ending in RR 0001 or similar).
• A serial number.
• The place or locality where the receipt was issued.
• The date the gift was received (for cash gifts, the year is enough).
• The date the receipt was issued, where it differs.
• The donor’s full name and address.
• The eligible amount of the gift.
• The signature of someone your charity has authorized to issue receipts.
• The name and website of the Canada Revenue Agency.

For a non-cash gift, add the exact day the gift was received, a brief description of the property, the fair market value at the time of the gift, and — if the property was appraised — the appraiser’s name and address.

A receipt missing any of these is not a slightly deficient receipt. It is not an official receipt, and the donor’s claim rests on it.

Serial numbers are a sequence, not a decoration

The serial number exists so that every receipt your charity has ever issued can be accounted for — issued, spoiled, cancelled or replaced. That only works if the numbers form an unbroken sequence. A spreadsheet where someone types “2026-047” by hand will eventually contain two 047s or no 046, and an unexplained gap in your receipt book is exactly the kind of thing an auditor is trained to pull on.

The practical rule: serials are assigned by the system that issues the receipt, in order, and are never reused — including the serials of receipts you cancel.

Split receipting, explained

When a donor receives something in return for their gift — dinner at the gala, a round of golf, a concert ticket — the receipt cannot be for the full amount they paid. What they received back is called the advantage, and the receiptable portion is the eligible amount:

eligible amount = what the donor gave − the fair market value of the advantage

Two thresholds shape this:

• The small-advantage rule. If the advantage is worth no more than the lesser of $75 and 10% of the gift, it does not reduce the receipt. The branded mug does not come off the receipt; the gala dinner does.
• The intention-to-give ceiling. If the advantage is worth more than 80% of what the donor paid, the CRA’s position is that there was no real gift at all, and generally no receipt can be issued.

When an advantage exists, the receipt must show it: the amount received, the value of the advantage, and the eligible amount, each stated separately.

Void and reissue, done right

You cannot quietly edit a donation receipt. Once issued, a receipt is a record, and correcting one is a two-part act:

1. The original is cancelled — marked as such and kept in your records, never deleted. Its serial number stays used.
2. The replacement is a new receipt with its own serial number, carrying a statement that it cancels and replaces the original, and the original’s serial number.

The same applies to a receipt a donor has lost: the replacement says which serial it replaces. What the CRA is protecting against is the same gift being claimed twice, and the replaces-serial trail is what makes that checkable.

And keep your copies. Duplicates of every receipt — including the cancelled ones — stay in your books.

The checklist

Before a receipt leaves the building:

• Every required element from the list above is present
• The charity name and address match what the CRA has on file
• The serial number is system-assigned and sequential
• Any advantage is valued and stated, and the eligible amount is the net
• Advantage over 80% of the payment? Stop — that is likely not a gift
• Corrections cancel the original and reference its serial
• A duplicate is retained, cancelled receipts included

How Reach handles each of these

We built receipting into Reach because the failure mode above is not carelessness — it is asking a volunteer to hold eleven required fields and a serial sequence in their head.

Reach assigns sequential serials automatically and never reuses one. Split receipting is a field, not a calculation you do beside the keyboard: record the advantage and the eligible amount is derived. Voiding a receipt cancels it in place and the reissue carries the replaced serial, so the trail the CRA expects is the trail that exists. And every receipt lives on the donor’s record, next to the gift it receipts.

If you run a nonprofit, this is the boring infrastructure we think you should never have to think about again.