Donation Codes for a French Association, and the Receipt You Owe Afterwards

A French association puts a code on a collection box at a village fête. It works: forty people scan it over an afternoon, and the money lands. In February a donor emails asking for his reçu fiscal, and the treasurer opens the bank statement to find a line with an amount, a date, and no name.

That is the whole problem with donation codes for a loi 1901 association, and it is not a technical problem. The receipt, not the payment, is the deliverable. Design backwards from it.

The reçu fiscal is the product

An association governed by the loi du 1er juillet 1901 that is eligible under the mécénat regime can issue a reçu fiscal to its donors, on the CERFA model n° 11580, "reçu au titre des dons à certains organismes d'intérêt général". Eligibility comes from articles 200 and 238 bis du code général des impôts, and issuing receipts when you are not eligible is its own problem, so settle that question before printing a code, not after.

For an individual donor, article 200 du CGI gives a reduction of income tax of 66 percent of the amount given, within a limit of 20 percent of taxable income. Donations to organisations providing aid to people in difficulty attract 75 percent up to an annual ceiling that the article fixes, with the 66 percent rate resuming above it. Mécénat by companies runs under article 238 bis, on its own terms. None of that is your decision to make; your job is to hand the donor a document that lets them claim it.

Look at what the form asks for and the design brief writes itself. A receipt carries an order number, the beneficiary organisation and its object, the donor's name and address, the amount, the date of the payment, the nature and form of the gift, the means of payment, and a signature from someone entitled to give it.

Now compare that with what a bare payment code gives you: an amount and a date.

So the code has to open a form, not a payment

This is the single decision that separates a donation code that works from one that generates February emails.

A code pointing straight at a payment handle, whether a card link or a transfer, collects money anonymously. That is fine for a bucket of coins and useless for a receipt. A code pointing at your own donation page, which asks for name and postal address before taking the payment, produces a record you can turn into a receipt without asking anyone anything afterwards.

Practical form design for that page:

• Name and postal address required, with one line of explanation: without them, no reçu fiscal is possible. People accept this immediately when told why.
• Email required, because that is how the receipt is delivered.
• Amount preset in a few steps plus a free field. Presets raise the average; the free field stops the donor who wanted something else from abandoning.
• A visible "I do not want a receipt" path for people who genuinely want to give anonymously. Then you are not holding data you cannot use, and the donor is not misled about what happens next.
• Nothing else. Date of birth, telephone, how they heard about you: every extra field is a drop in completion and a data-retention question you did not need.

One code per campaign, not one per association

The receipt is annual, but your accounting is per campaign, and the destination is the only place you can encode which is which.

A single permanent code that everyone prints on everything gives you one undifferentiated stream. One code per campaign, or per collection point, lets the treasurer reconcile a fête, a Christmas appeal and a permanent box separately, and lets you close a campaign page without breaking the poster that points at it. Our general piece on donation codes for non-profits covers the placement side of that.

Make the destination repointable. A code printed on a hundred flyers for the October appeal should lead somewhere sensible in January, not to a dead page. An expired campaign page that redirects to the general donation page is a small amount of work that keeps every piece of paper you ever printed alive.

Two French obligations that arrive with the receipts

The first is a declaration. Article 222 bis du CGI requires organisations that issue receipts or attestations letting taxpayers claim a reduction to declare each year the total amount of gifts and payments received in the previous calendar year or last closed exercise, and the number of documents issued. The declaration is due within three months of the close of the exercise, or, where the exercise closes on 31 December or none closes during the year, by the second working day following 1 May. Failing to file on time carries a fine of 150 euros, raised to 1 500 euros for a second consecutive year.

The practical consequence for the code: you need a countable, per-receipt record. A spreadsheet assembled in April from bank lines and memory does not produce that number reliably. A donation form that writes one row per gift does.

The second obligation is easier to trip over, because a code makes the triggering behaviour so easy. An organisation that calls publicly for donations is making an appel public à la générosité, governed by the loi n° 91-772 du 7 août 1991. Above a threshold set by décret n° 2019-504 du 22 mai 2019 at 153 000 euros of donations collected, the organisation must file a déclaration préalable with the préfet of its registered office and establish a compte d'emploi annuel des ressources. The threshold is assessed on the amount collected in the current exercise or in either of the two preceding ones.

A poster in the street with a code on it is an appeal to the public. So is a code in a shop window, on a market stall, or in a leaflet through letterboxes. Nothing about the medium changes the analysis, and a small association that grows quickly can cross the threshold in a year without anyone having thought about it.

Things that look like donations and are not

Worth saying plainly, because it is where receipts get issued wrongly:

• A cotisation that buys membership benefits is not a don.
• A tombola ticket, a raffle, a cake, a drink at the buvette are sales. Money changed hands for something.
• An event ticket is a sale, even for a charity gala, except to the extent of any genuinely gratuitous supplement.
• A don with a counterpart stays a don only where the counterpart is symbolic or institutional and of limited value, within the limits the tax administration's own doctrine sets.

So if one code at your fête covers the tombola, the buvette and the donation box, you have mixed three tax treatments into one stream. Use separate destinations, or separate codes, and let the accounting fall out correctly instead of being untangled in spring.

The code as a physical object

An association's codes tend to live in the worst conditions of any codes I see: taped to a box, out in the weather, on a laminated sheet on a church noticeboard, or on a stall that gets packed into a van every Saturday.

• Size for the distance people actually stand at, which for a collection box is arm's length and for a noticeboard is a metre or more.
• Print the URL underneath. Some donors will type it rather than scan, and it is the only thing that works when a code is scratched.
• Name who you are next to the code. A code on an unnamed box is indistinguishable from a sticker someone else put there, and that doubt stops donations.
• Laminate or use a weatherproof sticker, and check it every few weeks. A code nobody has scanned in a month is usually a code that no longer scans.
• Keep the payment page simple. Our page on payment codes covers the mechanics; for donations the only thing that matters is that the form loads instantly on a poor connection in a field.

Start from the receipt, work back to the form, then put a code in front of the form. Do it in that order and February is quiet.