Help Center

Find answers to common questions about Tax Receipt Generator

Why a mailing pack

Donors without an email on file — or on a mail-only run — still need a paper receipt. Printing, addressing, and stuffing envelopes one at a time doesn’t scale past a handful of donors, so the Distribute hub’s Mail tab can generate everything you need for a physical mailing in a single download instead of building each piece by hand.

Generating a pack

From the Mail tab, click Generate mailing pack and choose a scope: Receipts needing mail, All receipts in this batch, or Selected receipts (the rows you ticked). Then choose the print contents:

  • Packets — one packet per donor: the cover letter (when your run’s shared email/letter template has one switched on), then every receipt page, then any mail attachments you configured for the donor’s language.
  • Receipts only — no letters and no extra attachments, just the receipts.

Click Check files and review to see exactly what will be printed (letters, attachments, languages, and any exclusions) before you Download reviewed pack. If anything changes after you review, you are asked to review again. Cover-letter packets are limited to 100 recipients per download; receipts-only output can cover up to 5,000 receipts, so a whole batch fits in one download.

A packet download is a single zip containing:

  • mailing-packets.pdf — the ready-to-print packets described above. Print it single-sided. It already includes every receipt, so do not also print receipts.pdf.
  • labels.pdf — mailing address labels laid out for Avery 5160 sheets (3 columns × 10 rows), one label per included receipt, in the same order as the packets.
  • receipts.pdf — every included receipt’s PDF concatenated into one file, in the same order as the labels. This is the receipts-only alternative to the packets file.
  • addresses.csv — a plain address list of everyone included, useful as a mail-merge source or a paper record of who’s in the batch.
  • manifest.json and PRINTING.txt — the list of what was included and short print instructions.

A Receipts only download contains receipts.pdf, labels.pdf and addresses.csv.

The letter comes from the Mail letters and attachments panel on the Mail tab, which edits the same shared template your email uses. Letters never fall back to the email body: with no letter configured you get receipts only.

An organization-level setting, Include receipt # on labels, controls whether the label text also shows each receipt’s number — handy if you want to cross-reference a returned envelope back to a specific receipt.

What gets excluded, and why

A receipt is left out of the pack if it’s missing a usable mailing address (street, city, and postal code) or if its PDF isn’t available on storage. Before you generate, an advisory shows how many of the receipts in scope have a complete address so you can fix gaps first; if a needed PDF is missing, generation is refused with a list of the affected receipts so you can regenerate them from the Receipts page and try again rather than silently shipping an incomplete pack.

Marking receipts as mailed

Generating a pack doesn’t change any receipt’s delivery status by itself — downloading a PDF isn’t the same as an envelope actually going in the mail. After the pack downloads, a prompt offers to mark the included receipts as mailed in one click, which moves each one from Pending mail to Mailed. You can also mark receipts mailed individually or in bulk from the Mail tab at any time, independent of generating a pack — useful if you print now but don’t drop the mail until later. Reaching Mailed (like Email sent and Skipped) is an end state that counts toward completing the Distribute step; see The Distribute Hub for the full status table.

Can't find what you need? Contact support