The choice
After importing, you can choose how your imported transactions turn into receipts:
- Per Donor -- every transaction belonging to the same donor is combined into a single receipt covering all of their gifts. Donors are matched by customer ID, email, or name, in that order of priority, so the same person's separate donations end up on one receipt even if they gave several times.
- Per Transaction -- each individual transaction becomes its own receipt.
You see a live count for each option -- how many receipts Per Donor would produce versus how many Per Transaction would produce -- before you confirm, so you know exactly what you're committing to.
Today this choice appears when importing from QuickBooks: on the import success screen, and again if you finalize a QuickBooks-sourced batch from the batch editor without having made the choice yet. File and Google Sheets imports don't currently offer this choice -- each imported row becomes its own receipt.
What aggregation looks like
When you group by donor, the aggregated view shows a per-donor total with an expandable breakdown of the underlying transactions that make up that total -- so you can see exactly which individual gifts were combined before you commit to generating receipts from them. Donors missing an email address are called out in that review, which matters if you're planning to deliver by email rather than mail.
How the choice affects your receipts
- Receipt count: Per Donor always produces fewer or the same number of receipts as Per Transaction -- one per unique donor instead of one per gift. A donor who gave five times in the year becomes one receipt instead of five.
- Credits: since one credit is consumed per receipt PDF generated, fewer receipts means fewer credits spent. Aggregating a donor's five gifts into one receipt costs 1 credit instead of 5.
- Receipt content: a Per Donor receipt reflects the combined total and lists the individual gifts that make it up, rather than showing a single donation amount the way a Per Transaction receipt does.
Which one fits
- Per Donor fits an annual-summary approach -- one official tax receipt per supporter per year that accounts for everything they gave, which is typically what donors expect and what keeps your credit usage down.
- Per Transaction fits situations where you want to acknowledge each individual gift on its own -- for example, a donor who expects a separate receipt each time they give, or when your organization's process ties one receipt to one specific donation event.
Related
- CSV Format -- how imported data is structured before aggregation
- Generating Receipt PDFs -- where credits are actually consumed
- Credits -- how credit consumption works