PubliposterIssuing donation receipts for a charity
Every January, the same job. One receipt per donor, with the right name, the right amount, the right date, and often several hundred of them.
The shape of the problem
A charity whose donors can claim tax relief has to give each of them a receipt. The form is fixed. What changes between one receipt and the next fits on one hand: who gave, their address, how much, when, and sometimes a sequence number.
The data already exists, in the donations spreadsheet or in an export from your fundraising software. The whole job is pushing a table through a form, several hundred times.
What to prepare
The receipt form, in its current version, from whichever authority prescribes it. Do not reuse last year’s copy without checking it is still the one in force.
Then the donations file, one row per receipt. If the same donor appears more than once, total them up first: that is spreadsheet work, not mail merge work.
Useful columns
| Column | Note |
|---|---|
| Name | Split or combined, depending on the space the form allows |
| Full address | Often several lines; the field can wrap on its own |
| Amount | A plain number; formatting is applied afterwards |
| Amount in words | No column needed, it is worked out from the amount |
| Date of gift | Rewritten to the format you choose, whatever shape it arrives in |
| Receipt number | No column either; a counter can produce it, with leading zeros |
Why local processing matters here
A donations file is among the most sensitive lists a charity holds. It names people, says how much each gave, and to what cause. Uploading it to an online service to make PDFs hands a copy of all that to a third party.
This file does not leave your computer, because there is no address it could be sent to. You can check that by disconnecting after the page has loaded: the merge still runs. The privacy page goes into detail.
The years after
The template is saved and can be exported to a file. Next year, if the form has not changed, the campaign is a matter of importing the new spreadsheet and generating again.
What this tool does not do
It does not decide which gifts qualify for what, does not check the charity’s eligibility, and replaces no part of your accounting checks. It fills in a form with the data you give it. The rest belongs to the charity and, where there is one, its accountant.
Set up the receipt runPage last revised