Donor Categories

You can have two sets of categories to categorize donors. You do not have to use these at all (unlike donation categories, which must be used). They are maintained just like donation categories are maintained, via the options Maintenance à Donor Category 1 and Maintenance à Donor Category 2.

As an example of their use, one set of categories might be used to track members vs. attenders of a church, while the other set of categories might be used to track high, medium or low donors.

You would probably not want to use Donor Categories to track characteristics of your donors in cases where they can have more than one value from the same list, because you can only pick one Category from each of the two Donor Category lists for each donor. For instance, suppose a church had multiple committees that some of its donors sit on, and some donors sit on more than one committee. Then using Donor Category 1 to record which committee a donor sits on would not really work, because you could only record the first committee.

Non-Receiptable Donor Categories

Some donors on your list may not be supposed to ever receive an official receipt generated by the Receipt menu options. One example would be if you have a donor such as "Cash", in which you enter all anonymous cash donations. At least in Canada, you should also never issue official charitable receipts to other charities, if they donate to you.

You can mark donors as Non-Receiptable, so that they never receive a receipt, by creating special values in either (or both!) of the Donor Category 1 or Donor Category 2 lists, and selecting one of those values for the Non-Receiptable donor.

You will notice that beside each Category name on this maintenance window, there is a display-only field "Receiptable", to show whether that category is Receiptable or Non-Receiptable. It shows a check mark for Receiptable, or an "X" for Non-Receiptable. This is based on the categories being Non-Receiptable if they contain exactly "Non-Receiptable", or start with "NR ", or end with " NR". Examples of the latter would be "Member NR" or "NR Member". "NR" is an abbreviation for "Non-Receiptable".

Individual donations can also be marked as Non-Receiptable, even for donors who are otherwise Receiptable. For details on the ways to mark a donation as Non-Receiptable, please see Non-Receiptable Donors and Donations.