Statements and Receipts

Some users want to be able to let their donors know how much they have given at various points during the year (e.g. quarterly) and also want to let them know their totals at the end of the year.

You can't do this by using only the official receipts generated by the Receipt menu options, because once a donation has been included in one receipt, it will not appear on any future receipts generated for the same donor. This is correct, because otherwise you would be double-reporting the same donations, and users would be claiming too large a deduction on their taxes!

The solution to this is to use either Reports à Donation à Details, One Page per Donor or Reports à Donation à Category Totals, One Page per Donor as, in effect, "statements" to your donors of how much they have given. These reports contain very much the same information as receipts do, and they can be selected for a range of dates (e.g. one quarter of the year).

An alternative way to create statements is with the Letters à Mass Mailing menu option, selecting the "Total Donations information" option in Section 1. That allows you to specify a range of dates, and to include a detailed donations section and/or a category totals section, and also, unlike the built-in reports mentioned in the previous paragraph, allows you to add your own wording.

There are actually two possible approaches to using these reports or mail merges in conjunction with official receipts:

1.	Send out the "statements" to your donors periodically during the year, and only generate and send out receipts using the Receipt menu options at year-end , which will thus include all of the year's donations.

2.	Generate and send out official receipts to your donors periodically during the year, and along with a final receipt for the last part of the year, also generate a "statement" for the entire year to send out with it.

Which of these options you wish to use is entirely up to you, though most users seem to prefer the first option. And of course, many users do not feel a need to send periodic statements at all, and just stick with either year-end receipts, or receipts for individual donations sent out soon after the donations are received.

One additional type of "statement" mail-merge letter is the Pledge Information letter, which reports on donor's pledges, and what they have paid on those pledges. However, unless you are only recording donations against pledges in DONATION, and never recording any unpledged donations, these letters cannot be viewed as a complete statement to the donors.