Generating U.S. Receipts

For users in the U.S.A., there are a couple of particularly helpful features. First, U.S. charitable organizations often only issue receipts for donations of $250 or more, since for smaller donations donors can use their cancelled cheque as a receipt. To get this effect, just enter "250" for "Minimum Amount", and make an appropriate selection for "Minimum Type", in the Receipt à Filtered Donors option.

One minor problem with this approach is that if a donor gave $250, but it was split between two donation Categories (say $150 for "General" and $100 for "Special Project") then a receipt may not be issued (depending on your selection for Minimum Type), because each individual donation line you entered was for less than $250. To check for such problems, you can use Reports à Donation à Unreceipted Donations to list all donations that have not received a receipt, and watch for this problem.  The report is sorted by name then date, so you can look for two donations from the same person on the same date adding up to $250 or more. If you find any such donations, just use Receipt à Current Donor Original to issue a receipt for that donor individually.

In addition, U.S. users must check the "U.S.A." radio button under Maintenance à Receipt Options. This causes the receipt format to be significantly different. There is no tear-off section to separate the part that the donor sends in with their taxes, and the part that they keep, because the receipt does not have to be sent in with your taxes in the U.S.

The following sentence is also added to U.S. receipts: "Pursuant to Internal Revenue Code requirements for substantiation of charitable contributions, no goods or services were provided in return for the Tax Deductible contributions". Note that this implies that if donors give amounts that are entirely for goods or services, they either should not be entered into DONATION or must be given one of the "magic" Cheque No / Paid By values of "Non-Receiptable" or "Pre-Receipted" that prevents them from being included in the receipt. However, if you have donations that include a pure donation component, and another component that is for goods or services, they really cannot be handled properly by DONATION at the moment. If this is a problem for you, please contact me and we can discuss what improvements would be required for the program to handle this.

New for version 2.70: There is now an option to have your organization's Tax ID / EIN printed on your receipts. The IRS does not require you to put this number on charitable receipts. Many users do not feel that this is required, and some feel that it is a bad idea, because fake charities could steal and use this number. However, many users do wish to have this number printed on their receipts. Only fill in the Charitable # or Tax ID / EIN field on the Maintenance à Organization Info window if you wish it to be printed on your receipts.