Correct a Donation

Goal: Fix a gift that was entered incorrectly — wrong amount, wrong date, wrong payment method — and settle a cash or check gift that is stuck showing Pending.

When to correct a gift

Correcting is the right tool when the details of the gift itself are wrong:

• The amount was keyed wrong
• The date is wrong — the gift came in last Friday, not today
• The payment method is wrong — most often a cash or check gift recorded as a card
• The notes need fixing or filling in

If the gift is credited to the wrong campaign or fund, that's a reclassification, not a correction. If money needs to go back to the donor, that's a refund.

Only gifts you entered by hand can be corrected

The edit action appears only on gifts staff recorded manually. Gifts that came through your online donation form, an embedded form, or a card terminal were processed by the payment processor, and their amount, date, and status belong to that record of the payment — editing them here would put your books out of step with the money that actually moved. Those gifts show no pencil or Edit button.

You can still reclassify a processed gift to move it to the right campaign or fund, and refund it if money needs to go back. If a processed gift has genuinely wrong details, talk to whoever manages your payment processing rather than editing the record.

How to correct a gift

You can correct a donation from two places:

• A donor's profile — open the person, find the gift in Donation History, and click the pencil icon on the gift's row.
• A campaign's donation list — open the campaign, switch to the manage view, and click Edit on the gift's row.

Then:

1. Change the amount, donation date, payment method, or notes as needed.
2. Enter a reason for the change. This is optional but strongly recommended — it is stored in the audit trail alongside every field you changed.
3. Click Save changes.

Only the fields you actually changed are updated. Anything you leave alone stays exactly as it was.

A corrected amount (or date) flows straight through to the donor's lifetime giving, largest gift and giving level, so a gift keyed as $10,000 instead of $1,000 stops lifting the donor into a higher level as soon as you save.

Why a gift shows as Pending

Pending means the system is still waiting on a payment to confirm. When someone gives through your online donation form or a card terminal, the gift starts Pending and flips to Completed on its own once the processor confirms the money moved — seconds for a card, a few business days for ACH.

Gifts you record by hand are different: the money already arrived, and there is no payment in the system to wait on. Cash, check, stock, in-kind, and "other" gifts are marked Completed the moment you save them.

But a gift recorded by hand with an electronic payment method — Credit Card, Bank Transfer, or Online — is saved as Pending, because those methods normally imply a payment to confirm. When you keyed it in after the fact (the donor paid at a separate terminal, or the transfer landed straight in your bank), there is no payment for the system to find, so the confirmation never arrives and the gift sits Pending indefinitely.

Two common ways a gift ends up stuck:

• A cash or check gift was keyed with the wrong payment method, typically as a card.
• A card, bank transfer, or online gift was recorded manually after the money had already been received elsewhere.

warning

Pending gifts do not count toward campaign and event raised totals, donor lifetime giving, or your fundraising reports. A gift stuck in Pending is quietly missing from your numbers, so it's worth fixing as soon as you spot one.

Mark a gift as completed

Open the gift for editing. If it is Pending and has no payment attached, the dialog offers a Mark this donation as completed checkbox, already ticked for you. Leave it ticked and click Save changes.

This works whatever the payment method says. If the method is also wrong, fix it in the same step — but you never need to relabel a card gift as "cash" just to get it to count. Record how the money actually arrived, and settle it as it stands.

Once saved, the gift immediately counts toward campaign totals, donor statistics, and reports. If your affiliate uses accounting integration, settling is also the moment the gift's journal entry is created — a pending gift is never on the books, so nothing appears in your accounting exports until you mark it completed.

When the checkbox doesn't appear

The gift is already Completed, it was refunded or failed, or your role cannot settle gifts — ask a fundraising coordinator or administrator. Gifts that failed or were refunded cannot be marked completed; if a refunded gift needs to be reinstated, record it as a new donation.

Gifts processed by the payment processor never reach this dialog at all — they aren't editable, and their status updates on its own when the payment settles or fails.

Audit trail

Every correction is recorded permanently, one entry per field you changed, capturing:

• Who made the change
• When
• The old value and the new value
• The reason you entered

Marking a gift as completed is recorded the same way, so a settled gift can always be traced back to the person who settled it and why.

Who can correct a gift

Correcting a donation requires the donations.donations.update permission — the same one used for reclassifying. By default that means Fundraising Coordinators, Administrators, and Super Administrators.

Marking a gift completed is held to a higher bar than editing one: it requires affiliate-wide or system-wide update permission, so a donor who can correct a note on their own gift can never mark it completed themselves. Because settling a gift makes it count toward campaign totals and lifetime giving, this stays a back-office action.

note

The Staff role can record donations but cannot correct them out of the box. If your front-desk or event-desk staff enter gifts, consider granting them donations.donations.update so they can fix their own keying mistakes without escalating.

Correct vs. reclassify vs. refund

	Correct	Reclassify	Refund
Changes the gift's details?	Yes — amount, date, method, notes	No	No
Changes where it's credited?	No	Yes	No
Money moves?	No	No	Yes — returns funds to the donor
Can settle a pending gift?	Yes, when no payment is attached	No	No

Use Correct when the gift itself was keyed wrong. Use Reclassify when it's credited to the wrong place. Use Refund only when money needs to come back.