Generating Charitable Receipts

Most organizations will choose to issue all of their receipts after the year end. Current Canadian government regulations recommend that they be generated and distributed to donors by the end of February. Other countries may have other deadlines. However, you can also generate a receipt for one donor at a time at any time during the year.

Receipts are numbered sequentially within a year. For instance, for the year 2007, the numbering starts at 2007-0001 and goes up to at most 2007-9999. Once a donation has had a receipt issued for it, the receipt number (without the part for the year and any leading 0's) appears in the display of the donation in the Donations area of the main window.

You should probably never issue receipts for a given donation received by cheque until you have deposited the cheque and given time to make sure it is not NSF. If a cheque does come back NSF, just delete that donation for that donor. (You could also change its Amount to $0, but then it will still appear on the receipt.)

To generate a receipt for one donor, find the donor then use the Receipt à Current Donor Original option. This creates the receipt for all donations by that donor that haven't yet been included on a receipt. The receipt is displayed on the screen, and you can print it.You will be prompted as to whether you want to print a second copy for your records.

If you don't print receipts that you have generated and you then exit the window on which you are viewing them, you are prompted as to whether or not to save the receipts back to the database. (Whatever you do, the donations included in the receipt will still be saved!) You can answer Yes to save the receipts, and then later reprint them either with Receipt à Reprint Range, or the Letters menu mail-merge options. Or, you can answer No to not save the receipts, in which case it is as if you never used this menu option. If you do print the receipts, they are always saved.

If you wish to just see a sample receipt for a donor, without saving anything back to the database, you can use the Receipt à Current Donor Sample option. These are never saved, even if you print them.

There are actually two ways to display the receipts once they have been generated. The standard way uses built-in reports. They cannot be edited, but you can make some changes to what is included in them via options in the Maintenance à Receipt Options window. The other way (which became available starting in version 3.10 of DONATION) is generate them via mail merge. This happens if you check the "Create Receipts via mail merge instead of normal report method" checkbox in that same options window. In that case, they are generated using standard mail-merge letter files that replicate the built-in reports for receipts, and which you can edit. To edit their Letter File (that determines their wording and structure), go to Letters à One Letter, select the radio button for Selected Receipt information, make sure the checkbox to use standard filenames for the Letter File is checked, and click Edit below the name of the Letter File. You can make any changes you wish, then save your changes. See the section on Generating Receipts using Mail Merge for details.

Organizations that are not in Canada should always go to Maintenance à Receipt Options to specify which country they are in, as part of their initial setup. This will guarantee that they get the correct receipt format, whether they are using the built-in reports, or the mail merge option.

I said above that all donations by a donor that haven't yet been included on a receipt will be included when you generate a receipt for them. This is actually not entirely true. There are two special values you can specify in the Cheque No / Paid By field for the donation, "Non-Receiptable" and "Pre-Receipted". (You can select them from the drop-down list of options for that field.) If you use either of those values, that donation will never be included in a charitable receipt. You would use this for income that was not eligible to be part of a receipt, or for "flow-through" money that came to you from this donor but which has already received a receipt from a 3rd party source, such as an Internet charitable donation service or the United Way.

Another way to prevent donations from being receipted is to set the donor's Category 1 or Category 2 field to "Non-Receiptable". This will prevent any donations for that donor from being receipted, regardless of what you set the Cheque # / Paid By field to.

After you are sure you have received all of the donations for a given year, and you are ready to print off all of the receipts, choose Receipt à All Donors from the menu. This will create receipts for at most 500 donors in one batch (it tells you if it is imposing that limitation). Again, you can preview them, and after you Print them you are given an option to print a 2nd copy for your records.

If you received the message about printing at most 500 receipts, just go back and run Receipt à All Donors again, and repeat until they are all done. The reason I have imposed this limitation is that the way the receipts are generated uses a lot of memory in your computer, and I was concerned that the program might run out of memory if I let it generate them all at once. Do not worry, you can print all of your receipts no matter how many donors you have.

When you are printing all the receipts, I recommend that you not exit the window displaying them until your printer has finished printing them successfully. That way, if for instance you need to replace the ribbon or ink cartridge and reprint them because you ran out of ink, you will still be able to click the Print button again and print them successfully.

If you do have a problem printing a batch of receipts, and you have already exited the window displaying them, you can reprint them with Receipt à Reprint Range. This option prompts you for the starting and ending receipt numbers that you want to reprint, and then recreates them and gives you an option to print them again. (Being able the specify the receipt numbers is very helpful if some of your receipts printed before, but others didn't.)

If you have generated a batch of receipts and realize that you did not want to do so, you can delete them with the Receipt à Delete Range option.

You can also print a selected subgroup of all outstanding receipts with the Receipt à Filtered Donors option. This brings up a window where you can select criteria based on the Donor (a value of Category 1, a value of Category 2, or some text found in Other Info 1, 2, or 3) or criteria based on individual Donations (a minimum donation Amount or a donation Category). All donors and donations matching all entered criteria, which haven't yet been included on a receipt, will have the receipts generated for them. Like Receipt à All Donors, this will print at most 500 receipts at a time. Please read the help page on Generating Filtered Receipts for full details on this option.

NOTE: The appropriate person whose name is printed on the receipts (entered as "Receipting Person" in Maintenance à Organization Info) must sign the receipts for them to be valid. (I believe you can also use a rubber stamp of the signature.) You can also use a bitmap signature.

If you have already distributed the receipts and a donor calls up and says that they lost their receipt, or there is a correction to the data in their receipt, you may not just issue another copy of the receipt (because an unscrupulous donor could submit both to the government!). Instead, select the donor from the list, then use the Receipt à Current Donor Duplicate/Corrected function to reprint the receipt. This adds the word "Duplicate" to it so that it is clear that this is a replacement receipt. If there was a correction (one of the donations comprising the receipt was deleted) it instead adds the word "Corrected". The duplicate or corrected receipt has the same receipt number as the original. See Generating Duplicate or Corrected Receipts for more information.

You may also print a summary report of all receipts issued during the year so far, via Reports à Receipt à All Receipts. It is advisable to print this off and save it with your duplicate copies of the receipts.

You can print mailing labels to go on the envelopes for the receipts generated on one day by using the Reports à Receipt à Mailing Labels option. Alternatively, you can use window envelopes such as one that is 9 1/2" x 4", with the window starting about 5/8" in from the left edge, and 2 1/4" down from the top edge. The window is about 4 1/2" x 1". You will want to print off a receipt, fold it in thirds, and try it in such an envelope before you buy many of them!

If you have selected the option to print the donation Descriptions on the receipt, and you have long descriptions, they may wrap onto two lines, because there is not enough room across the line for the complete description. In some odd cases, where the description is just almost long enough that it needs to wrap, the program may get a bit confused and leave space for two lines of description, even though it does not actually put anything on that 2nd line. Sorry, this is something I can't do anything about. It just looks a bit odd visually.

Receipts for Canada have two sections - a top part that the donor submits with their tax form, and a bottom part for them to tear off and keep for their own records. Bilingual French/English receipts and French-only receipts for Quebec have three sections, so that one copy can be sent with the Federal tax form and one with the Provincial form. U.S. receipts do not need multiple sections because the receipt is not submitted with the donor's tax form. Each section of any of the types of receipt includes the Member/Envelope # for the donor with their name, if such a number has been entered.

The bottom part of the receipt optionally includes details of all individual donations included on that receipt, and also optionally includes a summary of donations by category. If you are including the details section, and you are not including the Cheque No or Description in the details, then if there is more than one donation included in the receipt, they will be printed in two columns to save space. If you include the Cheque No or Description, the details section is too wide to be printed in two columns.

You may use actual tear-off forms for Canadian receipts if you wish. The ones I have tried it on have a tear-off section at the top, which is 3 2/3" deep (1/3 of the page). You may want to try printing a receipt on your printer before you spend money for such forms, to make sure the borders built in to your printer work with paper that size. It appears that you cannot just buy such forms at a stationery shop - you have to have them printed by a print shop or press such as Moore Business Forms. Just request plain 8 1/2" x 11" white bond paper, with a fine perforation at the position listed above. Some users may also prefer to ask for a security background on the top portion above the perforation, as in a cheque. Another option is that they can put very fine markings on the top portions that will show up if the receipt is photocopied. A few print shops in the Toronto area that could do such work are Minuteman Press, 416-733-8292, Gibson Printing, 416-504-8218, and Crain Drummond, 905-238-8866.

Another issue regarding receipts is related to the entry of the Eligible Amount for Donations. An example of when you might enter the Eligible Amount is a fundraising dinner. Suppose the donors buy tickets costing $100 for a fundraising dinner, and the actual cost of providing the dinner to your organization is $40. That means that only $60 of the donor's donation is eligible to be included on a charitable receipt. The way you enter this is to enter $100 for the Total Amount, and $60 for the Eligible Amount. The Eligible Amount is what the donor can claim on their taxes.

Note: As of late 2006, there are new Canada Revenue Agency regulations with regard to this situation, which they call "split receipting". They require the separate display of the following fields on a receipt:

- the total cash amount of the donation received by the charity

- the value of the advantage (what the donor received), and

- the eligible amount of gift for tax purposes.

All receipts for Canada or Quebec show all three of these lines, but only if an Eligible Amount has been entered. If no Eligible Amount has been entered for the donation(s) included in the receipt, the CRA only requires the last of those three lines above to be on the receipt, so that is what DONATION does.

You can control whether the Eligible Amount field is displayed in the Donations area of the main window with an option on the Maintenance à Main Window Options window.

Note for users in the U.S.A. and other countries: I am only aware that this "split receipting" concept applies in Canada, so at this point I do not recommend using the Eligible Amount field for the U.SA. or other countries.. Non-Canadian receipts always use the Eligible Amount, if it is entered, and otherwise use the regular Amount (or Total Amount) field.