Consolidated Receipts Are Now Giving Statements

Jarod Bonino

This week we’re changing the name of the Consolidated receipting feature (accessed from the Fundraising menu in your primary navigation bar within RE NXT) to Giving statements, and I want to provide some insight into this change.

Hello Raiser’s Edge community!

This week we’re changing the name of the Consolidated receipting feature (accessed from the Fundraising menu in your primary navigation bar within RE NXT) to Giving statements, and I want to provide some insight into this change.

Note: If you don't see Consolidated receipting (or Giving statements) yet in your Fundraising menu, don’t worry! This capability is being rolled out incrementally and will be available to everyone in coming weeks!

We’ve found that the name Consolidated receipting has led to some understandable confusion about what the capability actually is. This feature started as a convenient way to send a receipt for multiple gifts at once. However, the feedback we received from users like you (through a process we refer to as “discovery”) as well as from our early adopter program, highlighted a tangential (and perhaps more pressing) need for delivering a collective summary of giving from a particular donor over a defined time period.

We evolved the capability to address the feedback, and I believe we created a much more useful feature - we have many of you to thank for that! As the feature’s capabilities drifted further away from what I would refer to as an official “receipting” function, we failed to revisit the feature’s name. That has resulted in a bit of understandable confusion that I hope this small change will help clear up.

The primary questions we’ve received from users due to the capability’s name were:

• Why do gifts with a Receipt status of Do not receipt or Receipted display on Consolidated receipts sent from web view?

• Why isn’t the Receipt status changed (and why aren’t receipt numbers assigned) for gifts that have not yet been receipted when they are included on a Consolidated receipt sent from web view?

While I can see why these questions are being posed (and I certainly recognize the convenience that an aggregate receipting solution could provide – especially for things like Recurring gift payments that you might not want to send individual receipts for), the fact of the matter is that the current functionality is not intended to solve these problems. Instead, as I mentioned above, it aims to give you an easy way to send your donors a collective summary of giving from a particular donor over a defined time period. Commitments, payments, and soft credits will display on this summary regardless of their receipt status, and that is by design and intentional.

We believe Giving statements is a far better term for the function this capability is serving.

We will continue to review and prioritize work that may help you in the future with the aggregate receipting needs that we know exist (and are currently unmet with web view functionality), but we are hopeful that you will find uses for the Giving statements capability.

We apologize for any confusion we may have caused between the initial naming of this capability or in the renaming.

We are also excited to roll out a couple of key enhancements to this capability over the next few weeks that we think many of you will appreciate! Stay tuned to this community (and specifically the What’s new! content) for more details on those exciting changes!

Kelley Jain

Happy to hear this!  If they don't already include the Fund, I'd love to see that in a future rollout.

Aldera Chisholm

Fingers crossed that while Canadians don't have the NXT receipting functions yet, that we are being in the queue for web receipt functionality! Even if we have to use Consolidated Receipts only in Database View so that we can stay CRA complaint.

JoAnn Strommen

Haven't seen function yet but only makes sense.  Looking forward to seeing and sharing with our team.

Jarod Bonino

I would say check again this afternoon if you haven't already! Your organization's environment may have been included in the release wave that went out around noon today!

Maryah Converse

This is so frustrating! The Consolidated Receipting feature that rolled out in Dec/Jan was EXACTLY what we've needed and begged for from our online giving consultant for years now, and the new Giving Statements feature has removed all the functionality we were so excited about, and we've had to revert back to the clunky offline work-around we've been struggling with for years. 

Jarod Bonino

Hey Maryah,

I'm very sorry to hear about your frustrations! To be clear though, no functionality actually changed with this rename. It's possible that you had assumed the feature worked a certain way when it was named "Consolidated receipting", which is exactly what we were hoping to clear up with this rename. It's not that we changed the way anything works, we just update the name to more accurately reflect how it works.

Lynnette Fisher

Much better!  Thank you