I disagree with the expert here.
First on the issue of documentation that you must have. If you are audited, you are required to prove all the deductions that you claim. While the church may not be required to issue a statement except for donations of more than $250, you would be well advised to have some kind of letter or acknowledgment from the church thanking you for your services. The church’s letter does not have to specify the dollar value, you will do that with your receipts. However, if audited, you will want to have something to show the IRS that the receipts that you are showing them were actually spent on church repairs and not your own your own household repairs. In other words, you are required to have a receipt for every donation that you claim, even though the regulations do not require the church to issue a receipt for small donations.
Second, on the issue of reporting, I disagree that $250 is the threshold where you need to list individual items. You will list these as item donations, and you can use the purchase price as the fair market value and you can select “purchase price“ as the method of determining fair market value. When donating non-cash items to a charity, you must file form 8283 if the total of your non-cash donations is more than $500. TurboTax will prepare this form automatically. But even form 8283 does not require an itemized list of every nut and screw. If you listed the items as “church maintenance supplies“ or “church repair supplies“, that would certainly be sufficient. (Similarly, if you donated used clothing to Goodwill, you would not have to list every individual shirt on form 8283, you could list the donation as “used clothing”. And in fact, if you use the It’sDeductible module in TurboTax to value your Goodwill donations, and they are more than $500, TurboTax will group the entire donation on one line of form 8283.). If the donation value is less than $500, only the final total is reported to the IRS. You should certainly have an itemize list with receipts to keep in your financial records for at least three years in case of audit.
