Donation Receipts

Every completed gift in GoodBooks can produce a proper charitable acknowledgment — printed or emailed — with the IRS language donors need at tax time. Online gifts receipt themselves; for everything else it's one click, and GoodBooks tracks which gifts have been receipted so nobody is missed (or thanked twice).

Sending a receipt

Open the donation and use the buttons at the top:

• Print Receipt — a print-ready acknowledgment ("Gift Receipt — Tax Acknowledgment") with your organization's name, the donor and their mailing address, date, payment type (with the check number for checks), amount, campaign designations, and the tax language below. Use your browser's print dialog to print or save as PDF.
• Email Receipt — emails the acknowledgment to the donor's primary email address, subject "Gift Receipt — Thank You for Your Donation." The button shows Receipt Resend once a receipt has gone out.

Each donation shows a Receipt status — Sent with the date and address, or Not Sent. You can mark a receipt as sent by hand (say, you mailed a letter) so the donation list's receipt icons stay an accurate to-do list.

Online gifts receipt themselves. When a donation comes in through your giving page, the receipt is emailed automatically to the address the donor entered, and the gift is marked receipted. (Administrators who've opted into donation notifications get a copy.) A bank-account (ACH) gift is the one exception in timing: it sits as ACH Processing for about four business days, and the receipt is held until the payment clears, so nobody is thanked for a gift that gets returned.

What the receipt says

The acknowledgment includes what the IRS wants to see: your organization's legal name, EIN, the gift's date and amount, and the statement that no goods or services were provided in exchange for the contribution. If your organization is a verified 501(c)(3) public charity, the email adds that the contribution is tax-deductible to the full extent provided by law; otherwise it uses neutral acknowledgment language.

Two settings drive that, both under Settings → Organization:

• Tax ID / EIN — prints on every receipt.
• Public Charity Status — use Verify with CharityAPI to confirm your 501(c)(3) status; this is what turns on the deductibility language.

Making receipts yours

Under Settings → Customization: your logo (Organization tab) appears on emailed receipts, and the Email Templates tab has a Donation Receipt message box — a personal thank-you inserted into every receipt email above the gift details. The Reply-To Address is where donor replies land.

Special cases

• Anonymous gifts print a receipt with "Anonymous" as the donor; there's no one to email, and GoodBooks says so rather than failing silently.
• Donors without an email (or who have unsubscribed) can't be emailed — print the receipt instead and mark it sent.
• DAF and QCD gifts (donor-advised funds, qualified charitable distributions): the donor already received their tax benefit, so they shouldn't get a standard deductibility acknowledgment. Record these with the DAF/QCD payment types — they're flagged "no add'l deduction" and the year-end giving statement automatically lists them as non-deductible.

• Quid-pro-quo gifts (gala tickets, auctions — where the donor received something): the deductible/non-deductible split is handled on the year-end statement based on the campaign's Tax Treatment and Fair Market Value settings. For a single significant quid-pro-quo gift where the per-gift receipt matters, edit the printed receipt language by hand before mailing.

• Campaign changed after the receipt went out: the receipt lists the campaign, so re-send or re-print it after changing a gift's campaign.

Receipts vs. statements

The per-gift receipt says thank you now; the annual giving statement is the January summary of everything, with the deductible math done. Many organizations email receipts all year and mail statements in January — both are IRS-acceptable written acknowledgments.