PayPal Transaction IDs in Gift Records

Vanessa Wong

Hello Blackbaud Community!

We're implementing PayPal as a donation payment option and we have noticed that the unique PayPal Transaction ID is not recorded anywhere on the gift record. This ID will greatly help us to match and reconcile against PayPal and it would be really useful to have it in the gift record.

For people who are currently using PayPal do you record this Transaction ID? If not, how do you match your donations? I note that sometimes, the constituent record name is not the same as what is in PayPal.

Edit: Adding a link to the idea I submitted to BB about this:

Austen Brown

@Vanessa Wong - At a past org that had this integration, we would reconcile PayPal transactions against RE gifts weekly. When looking within PayPal there should be a “Blackbaud” tag within the transaction search that helped locate gifts that originated on BB forms. If you need the PP transaction ID to aid in future updates or reporting, then a gift attribute would be a good place to put this - it will require an import on your part to get it into RE.

Emmet O'Conlon

@Vanessa Wong I think it shows up in RE via OLX, at least. Screenshots from RE, then from the Paypal activity report I just pulled:

Vanessa Wong

@Austen Brown Thank you for your response. I have had a look at PayPal and there is a column in the Activity report that has Blackbaud in it.

Vanessa Wong

@Emmet OConlon We use NXT Donation Form instead of OLX for website donations and unfortunately the NXT Donation Forms do not add in the Transaction ID. I'll put it forth as an idea for NXT. Thanks for your reply.

Emmet O'Conlon

@Vanessa Wong Another instance of the new tech not doing all the work the old tech does :-( We use the NXT Donation Forms for everything except PayPal gifts because donor cover (donor pays option) does not work with PayPal, but the SmartThing OLX plugin does.

Vanessa Wong

@Emmet OConlon That is very interesting to know as this is something that we are considering to do in the future. Seems like NXT have a bit of work to do to bring it up to what OLX was doing.