How a Rajasthan watershed society brought 10BD compliance and expense tracking to a volunteer-run team

Jal Jeevan Samiti is a volunteer-run society working on watershed management, rainwater harvesting, and drought resilience in 18 villages across the Aravalli foothills. The society has no paid administrative staff; all operations are managed by a rotating committee of 7 village elders and a part-time bookkeeper who visits twice a month.

The society collects donations from local community members (mostly Rs. 500-5,000 per person), a few urban supporters in Udaipur and Jaipur, and one corporate CSR partner. Donor records were maintained in a hand-written register. 80G receipts were issued from a receipt book by the treasurer, who is a retired school teacher with no computer skills.

When 10BD filing became mandatory, the society had no way to comply. Their CA quoted Rs. 25,000 to digitise the records and file, which was a significant amount for an organisation with an annual budget of Rs. 12 lakh. The committee was genuinely worried about losing their 80G registration.

A younger committee member set up Donateazy on his smartphone and began entering donor records from the register. Over two weekends, all 520 active donors were migrated. The part-time bookkeeper was trained to record new donations using the mobile-friendly interface, which auto-generated 80G receipts.

For the annual campaigns (pre-monsoon watershed preparation), the society created an online donation page and shared it in WhatsApp groups of urban supporters. The 10BD export was generated in one click when filing season arrived. The expense tracking module replaced the hand-written cash book, with the bookkeeper entering expenses during his biweekly visits.

10BD filing was completed independently for the first time, without additional CA fees for data entry. 80G receipts now reach donors on the same day as the donation instead of at the next committee meeting (often 2-4 weeks later). The pre-monsoon online campaign raised Rs. 1.8 lakh from urban supporters, a channel the society had never tapped before. Total annual donations increased by 22%. The CA's annual audit time was halved because all records were already organised digitally.