Handling Non-Receiptable Donors and Donations

Some entire donors or individual donations should never be included in official charitable receipts created with the Receipt menu options, for various reasons.

An example of a non-receiptable donation would be if the donor is actually purchasing something of value for the money they gave you.

An example of a non-receiptable donor, at least in Canada, is another charity or foundation - you are not supposed to give them official charitable receipts.

Sometimes you receive donations that should not be included in a charitable receipt. Most commonly, this would be because the donor has already received a receipt from a 3rd party source, such as an Internet charitable donation service. Or, it could be a donation to you from another charity, or another type of income that you are recording, such as membership dues, that are not eligible for tax deductions. Finally, it could be a donation that is so small that your policy is to not issue receipts for that small an amount.

There are two ways to prevent a specific donation from ever being included in a receipt, either of which is sufficient.

1.	Use any Category value that is exactly "Non-Receiptable" or starts with "NR " or ends with " NR" (like "General NR" or "NR General"). These values are set up with the Maintenance à Donation Categories window. ("NR" is an abbreviation for "Non-Receiptable".)

Select one of two special values available in the Cheque No / Paid By field for the donation: "Non-Receiptable" or "Pre-Receipted". (You can select them from the drop-down list of options for that field.) Both "Non-Receiptable" and "Pre-Receipted" have exactly the same effect. Both are provided because you may feel that one or the other covers the situation of a given donation more accurately.

To prevent a specific donor from ever having its donations receipted, set the donor's Category 1 or Category 2 value to "Non-Receiptable", or anything starting with "NR " or ending with " NR",such as "NR Member" or "Member NR". ("NR" alone is not sufficient - it must start or end with that, and have an extra space as shown in the previous sentence.) If there is currently no such value on the drop-down lists for those fields, you can set it up on one of those lists with either the Maintenance à Donor Category 1 or the Maintenance à Donor Category 2 window.

When you add new donations for a donor whose Category 1 or Category 2 value is Non-Receiptable, you may optionally also optionally set the Category or Cheque # / Paid By value for that donation to a Non-Receiptable value. However, that is not required. No donation for a Non-Receiptable donor will ever be included in a receipt, no matter what its donation Category or Cheque # / Paid By value is.

N.B. in versions prior to 3.23c of DONATION, when you added new donations for Non-Receiptable donors, their Cheque # / Paid By value was automatically set to "Non-Receiptable". That is no longer the case, starting in version 3.23c, since it is not required, and doing so could make you incorrectly think that it was required.

Although non-receiptable donations should not be included in official charitable receipts created with the Receipt menu options, you will almost certainly want to acknowledge those donations in some way.

For individual non-receiptable donations, a thank-you letter of some sort could be done, with the Letters à One Letter menu option, using the Current Donation information option in section 1 of the window that comes up.

For non-receiptable donors, who have multiple donations, a thank you letter could be done with the same menu option, but using the Total Donations information option in section 1.