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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: GENERATING CHARITABLE RECEIPTS > Deleting Receipts |
On occasion you may create some receipts with one of the Receipt menu options, print them off or save them to PDF (which saves them in the database) and then decide that you don't want those receipts to exist. (If you email them, which also saves them to the database, you can't delete them, because donors will have received them! Instead, if there's a problem with them, you should correct them.)
If you have set a Receipt Password, entering it is required to delete receipts. You can do that by entering it when the program starts up (if you have also set a Program Entry password), or when you do this menu option that requires it.
Reasons for deleting receipts might be that you observe errors in them and want to fix them without the complications of Generating Corrected Receipts, or you were just testing out creating receipts mid-year, and you really wanted to only generate year-end receipts.
If you want to delete some receipts, but aren't sure which ones, you can use Reports ⇒ Receipt ⇒ All Receipts to see a numerical list of all receipts that have been issued for the current year.
You can delete receipts that you have created, subject to two limitations:
1.You should only delete receipts that have not been sent to the donors. Obviously, the program cannot enforce this, but it does remind you of this limitation. If you have already sent a receipt to the donor and need to correct it in some way, follow the instructions in Generating Corrected Receipts.
2.You can only delete a range of receipt numbers that end with the current last receipt number for the current year. This is because if you delete a range of receipts in the middle of the current receipt numbers, there will be a gap in your receipt numbering, which is not good in terms of accounting controls. In Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency requires that all of your receipts be sequentially numbered.
If you are satisfied about these two limitations and do wish to delete a range of receipt numbers, select the Receipt ⇒ Delete Range menu option. This brings up the Enter Receipt Numbers window, with the current last receipt number filled in for both the "From" (starting) and "To" (ending) number of the range of receipt numbers to delete. If you accept that default, it will just delete the very last receipt that has been created. To delete a larger range or receipt numbers, change the "From" number. (You cannot change the "To" number, because of limitation (2) listed above.)
When you are satisfied with the range, click OK. It will confirm that you want to delete that range, and then if you answer Yes to go ahead, it will delete the receipts in that range, and tell you whether or not it was successful in doing so.
Deleting receipts does not delete the donations that were included in those receipts! It merely removes the record of the receipts having been issued from the database, and removes the Recpt # field values from the donations that were included in those receipts.
Please Note: Once you have deleted a range of receipts, there is no way to get them back, unless you have a Database Backup that you made immediately before the deletion, and you Restore that backup.
What if I want to Delete a Receipt in the middle of the Receipt Number Range?
Since you cannot do that, as explained above, you will have find another way to deal with whatever the underlying problem is that leads you to want to delete that receipt. Most likely that will be by making some changes then creating a Corrected Receipt.
For instance, if the receipt was for donations that should have been recorded for a different donor, you could delete those donations, create a corrected receipt for the original donor (which will be for $0), then re-enter those donations for the correct donor and create a new receipt for them.
Deleting Canadian Replacement or Correction Receipts
Starting in version 3.64 of DONATION, for Canadian users, when a replacement or correction receipt is created, it gets a new receipt number, and the old receipt is retained and marked "Cancelled". See Replacement or Correction Receipts for Canada for more details.
This creates an odd issue if you are deleting a replacement or correction receipt, but the original receipt that it replaced or corrected is not being deleted. In that case, the effect of the deletion is to basically remove the fact that the original receipt was replaced or corrected, without deleting that original receipt. So, the donations that were included in the receipt being corrected have their Recpt # field set back to be the receipt number of the original receipt, and that original receipt's type is set back to its prior type. That will usually mean that the undeleted replaced or corrected receipt is now considered to be an original receipt again.
One more complex case where this will not be the case is for instance if receipt number 5 corrected receipt number 2, and then receipt number 5 was itself corrected by receipt number 10. If you then delete receipt number 10 (but not numbers 5 or earlier), receipt number 5 will revert to saying that it is a correction of receipt number 2.
This brings up a case where the deletion action will not be entirely correct, but unfortunately there is no obvious way to work around it. That is the case where the corrected receipt was for a different dollar amount than the original receipt, because donations were either deleted from it or added to it prior to the correction. If the correction receipt is then deleted, and its donations moved back to belong to the original receipt number, that original receipt will end up being for the same dollar amount, and including the same donations, as the deleted correction receipt. So, that original receipt will actually have been modified from its very original state.