Everyday Tasks

This chapter describes some common CiviContribute tasks.

Adding contributions

When your organisation receives a contribution from a contact, you can add it to their record.

If the donor does not already exist in the database, you need to first create a new contact record for them. Use the links on the CiviCRM home page to create a New Individual, New Organization, or New Household, and fill out any information you have for this contact. Once the record is created, you can then enter the contribution.

To manually enter a contribution for a contact in your database:

1. Find the contact's record using one of the contact search tools.
   
2. Select the contact's Contributions tab.
3. Click Record Contribution (Check, Cash, EFT...). Alternatively, if you have set up a payment processor that allows credit card transactions directly on your site, you may select the Submit Credit Card Contribution option and process the payment immediately.
   
4. Complete the new contribution form. The following screenshot shows the offline contribution (i.e. contributions via check, cash, EFT, etc.) form. If you selected to record a credit card contribution, the credit card form is almost identical except for the payment-related fields.

Record the contribution type, amount, received date (the default is the current day), receipt date (shown on the receipt generated by the system), and status (the default is Completed). Any custom fields for contributions will also appear on this form.

The Soft Credit To field works with personal campaign pages (PCPs) that harness your contacts' help for campaigns. As described in the previous chapter, when a donor sets up a PCP for their friends and family to make donations to your organisation, some of the credit goes to the donor who set up the PCP. The person giving the money receives a "hard" credit while the owner of the PCP receives a "soft" credit. When you enter a donation manually on the contribution form for the contributor, you can assign a soft credit to the owner of the PCP. Soft credits can also be applied to spouses, partners, or employers, to give an indication of how much money is coming from a relationship or providing a credit to employees if they urged their employers to donate. (There is more information about PCPs and campaign fundraising pages in the Configuring chapter of this section on CiviContribute.)

The Additional Details section near the bottom of the screen offers other options including adding a note about the contribution and entering the date when a thank-you letter was sent.

The last two sections allow you to enter whether the contribution was in honor of someone else (Honoree Information) and whether there is a premium associated with the contribution (Premium Information).

Viewing the CiviContribute dashboard

The CiviContribute main page or dashmboard summarises the contributions made, including lists of contributions received in the current month to date, year to date, and cumulatively since the campaign's inception. For example, the following screenshot lists the most recent contribution to a campaign using the Table Layout tab:

 

You can also view bar or pie charts to compare contribution totals across months of a given year and across years by clicking on the Chart Layout tab.

Finding contributions

Use this screen to find contributions made to your organisation.

To View the Find Contributions screen:

1. Click the Contributions Tab.
2. Select Find Contributions.
   

You can search based on a number of criteria, specifying date range, amount, contribution status etc.

Contributions must match all specified criteria in order to be returned, so the more criteria you enter, the narrower the search will be. For example, searching for the contribution type "donation" and the date range "January 1st to May 31st" will return contributions that meet both criteria.

The results screen from a search displays the the total amount for the results returned for that search, the number of contributions, and the average amount per contribution in addition to the subset of records resulting from the search:

 

You also have options under the "actions" menu once you select all or a subset of records. The "actions" menu allows you to:

• Batch Update Contributions Via Profile: this is useful if you want to update a large number of contributions' thank-you date at once, for example. You need to create the profile you want to use before you perform the search and batch update (see the the chapter Profiles in the Configuration section for more information about creating profiles).
• Delete Contributions: this removes contributions entirely from the system, as if they had never been entered in the first place. Editing contribtions and updating their status to canceled provides a better audit trail, but there may be situations where you do want to delete, such as a contribution entered on the wrong contact's record.
• Export Contributions: because this search is contribution-centric, it does not recognise if contributions come from the same contact. Therefore, if one contact has multiple contributions that fit the search criteria, that contact will appear as multiple rows when you export your spreadsheet. If you want to do searches that return one result per contact, use the contact advanced search.
  
• Print or Email Contribution Receipts: this allows you to create a PDF file of all the receipts in the search, or email the receipts to the associated donors.
  
• Send Email to Contacts: send an email to all or selected contacts found in the search.
  
• Update Pending Contribution Status: update the contribution status of all or selected contacts who have contributed online. This action only works with online contributions, and the same contribution status will be applied to all the contributions selected for updating.