Enhancements to declaration entity

For discussion:

J: AFAICS "advised of liability" is a requirement of any valid declaration at the point of declaration.
A: I agree, but still two reasons.

• The audit process requires a record that this occurred. If we make a box for it, and the staff have to tick it, it makes them much more likely to remember, and should be more convincing to the auditor.
• We could receive an email saying "please add gift aid to my donations". We would naturally create a declaration at this point that is not yet valid because not advised. We could send a written record to remedy that.

J: Oral seems to require a written record unless you have an audio recording of it? That's why I had this on the DeclarationType.
A: True, but this brings a risk that we force the site owner to double the number of declaration types: each one has a variant for oral and another for non-oral. I feel we should leave the site owner free to choose how they use declaration types. E.g. they might instead want declaration types to correspond to donation types: one for commerce, one for direct debit, one for a sponsorship form etc. If we have a field for "method" the software can calculate when a written record is required automatically (it would also be true if we are missing some information).

J: I was thinking to use bundles here [for method and evidence fields], with different configured fields in different bundles. We should provide config for the common circumstances, but allow sites to modify further for their use case. As the fields aren't used programatically, it seemed better to allow configuration to do the work here?

I feel we should leave the site owner free to choose how they use declaration types. E.g. they might instead want declaration types to correspond to donation types: one for commerce, one for direct debit, one for a sponsorship form etc. If we have a field for "method" the software can calculate when a written record is required automatically (it would also be true if we are missing some information).

Evidence is required by HMRC - if we have a base field we can enforce that. We could make evidence a reference to a media type, and add a field to say what it is evidence for. Then we could write some code that checked that the current changes that are being saved have matching evidence.

The debate is good, but I stand by my position.

The key point is that what amounts to evidence, and what is a good UI for entering that evidence, is not something we can know. Only the charity will know its existing systems for capturing and storing evidence & how to integrate with them, and what the predominant use cases are for data entry in its situation and how best to optimise UX for them.

We can't know that a media reference field is the best UX for any or most use cases. For example, when we create an email bundle I will suggest that we put fields "email address" and "email text received" on it as that's the best way to create a gift aid trail for an email.

The bundles should focus on optimal UX for different declaration scenarios.

I'm imagining we should provide configured (so optional and alterable) bundles:
- commerce (i.e. checkout)
- web (i.e. self declare by web UI)
- email (staff declare)
- phone (staff declare)
- face to face (staff declare)
- letter (staff declare)
- paper form (staff declare)

The question of when to send a written confirmation is rather complex. I do agree it needs careful discussion. See 🌱 Product requirements Active 3.2.
It looks like site builders should be able to require a written confirmation on a bundle, disallow a written confirmation on a bundle, or make it optional as staff specify.

'Advised of liability' is an interesting one. HMRC seem quite hot on it as part of an audit trail. I have some concern that the fact that e.g. a checkout is configured to show the liability message could provoke a query - can we prove that on such and such a date the user actually saw a liability message and what exact message did they see? It makes me wonder whether it's good even for commerce, web, paper form contexts to have a field that we can set to indicate that the liability advice was given at time of declaration. I'm wondering if even if we prefill it and don't allow staff to untick it on some bundles, it might still be useful at audit and 'look more convincing'.