What an advantage is
An advantage is anything of value a donor received in exchange for their gift — a dinner ticket, a raffle entry, a book, a golf round. When a donor received an advantage, only the portion of the gift that exceeds the value of what they got back is eligible for a tax receipt. Two fields capture this:
- Advantage description — what the donor received (for example, "Dinner and entertainment valued at $20").
- Advantage amount — the fair market value of that advantage.
Both fields are ordinary importable fields, and both become required once you indicate donors received an advantage.
Automatic calculation
The eligible amount is not something you type in or import directly — it's computed automatically as:
eligible amount = gift amount − advantage amount
Because it's derived rather than entered, the eligible amount stays consistent with the gift and advantage values that produced it. If you go back and edit a record's amount or advantage amount before receipts are generated, the eligible amount recalculates to match. This matters because the eligible amount is the legally significant number that ends up on the donor's receipt — keeping it derived rather than hand-typed removes a whole class of transcription errors.
Templates that show it
The eligible amount only applies where a gift can carry an advantage. The Canada CRA system templates split cash and in-kind gifts into "no advantage" and "with advantage" variants — ca-cash-with-advantage and ca-in-kind-with-advantage — and it's these with-advantage variants that print the advantage description, advantage amount, and computed eligible amount alongside the gift amount. The no-advantage variants don't need the calculation because the full gift amount is eligible.
Import fields to map
When mapping your import data, look for columns matching:
- Advantage Amount /
advantage_amount(aliases include Benefit Amount, FMV of Benefits, Quid Pro Quo) - Advantage Description /
advantage_description(aliases include Benefit Description, Goods/Services Description)
You don't need to map an "Eligible Amount" column from your source data — even if your spreadsheet has one, the system computes its own value from the gift and advantage amounts rather than importing it, so the number on the receipt is guaranteed to match the math. See Field Mapping for how import columns are matched to these canonical fields, and Custom Receipt Numbering for how the receipt number itself is generated alongside these amounts.