Skip to main content

Record a One-Time Gift

Goal: Capture a gift in Ayuna with the donor, amount, fund, and payment details set correctly so the receipt, ledger entry, and reporting all line up.

Three ways gifts arrive​

  • Self-served online — donor uses your public donate page or an embedded form. Ayuna creates the donation record automatically.
  • Manually entered — staff records a check, cash, or offline credit-card gift on the donor's profile.
  • Card-present — staff swipes/taps a card at a Finix terminal during an event or at the ReStore. See Process a Card-Present Payment.

This page covers the manual-entry flow. The self-served and card-present flows produce the same donation record and follow the same downstream rules.

Recording manually​

From the donor's profile, choose Record Donation. Capture:

  • Amount — the gross amount the donor gave
  • Date — the gift date (not the entry date)
  • Payment method — Check, Cash, Credit Card (offline), ACH, In-kind (use the in-kind flow instead), Stock, Other
  • Fund — defaulted from the campaign if you've selected one; override when needed
  • Campaign — optional; ties the gift to a fundraising appeal
  • Project — optional; ties the gift to a homeowner build or other restricted project
  • Fundraising event — optional; ties to a gala, golf, etc.
  • Notes — anything that helps future staff understand the gift
  • Reference number — the check, warrant or remittance number. For a grant cheque, put the award number here and the grant's Link a donation list will offer it
  • Gift instrument — how the gift was committed. Choose Grant agreement for a grant cheque so the grant can find it; leave it unspecified for an ordinary gift
  • Thank-you & receipt email — who, if anyone, is emailed about the gift (see below)

The receipt is generated automatically when the donation saves.

Thanking the donor yourself​

Some affiliates prefer to send a hand-written letter or note rather than let an automated email reach the donor first. The Thank-you & receipt email choice in the Record Donation dialog controls this for each gift:

  • Email the donor (the default) — the donor gets your automated thank-you email (if you have one set up) and the emailed receipt.
  • Don't send emails — we'll thank the donor ourselves — nothing is emailed to anyone. The receipt is still created, so you can find it on the Receipts page and download or print it to include with your letter. Receipts recorded this way show as not emailed there, and you can still send one later with Resend.
  • Send the receipt to a different email instead — type an address, such as your own or a colleague's. The receipt is emailed there instead of to the donor, and the automated thank-you is not sent. The receipt itself still names the donor.

The choice applies only to the gift you're recording; the next gift starts back on Email the donor.

Record how the money actually arrived. Cash, Check, Stock, and Other gifts are marked Completed as soon as you save them, because the money is already in hand. Gifts recorded with Credit Card, Bank Transfer, or Online start as Pending, since those methods normally imply a payment the processor still has to confirm — and a manually recorded one has no payment for the system to find, so it stays Pending and stops counting toward your totals. See Correct a Donation to mark those completed; you never need to relabel the payment method to make a gift count.

Recording a gift for someone who isn't a donor yet also gives them the Donor role, so they appear in your donor lists and their giving totals — lifetime giving, largest gift, giving level — start accumulating from that first gift. You don't need to add the role by hand first.

Tribute/memorial gifts​

If the donor is making the gift in honor or in memory of someone, mark it as a tribute on the donation form. Capture:

  • Tribute type (In Honor Of / In Memory Of)
  • Honoree name
  • Optional notification email for the family

Tribute information is stored in the donation notes for now (no dedicated structured fields yet). See Record a Tribute Gift for full handling and current limitations.

Stock and other non-cash gifts​

For appreciated stock, use payment method Stock and record:

  • The number of shares
  • The fair market value at transfer date

For other non-cash gifts (vehicles, goods, services), use the in-kind flow at Record an In-Kind Donation instead — it has the right lifecycle (received → appraised → recorded → disposed) and IRS-compliant acknowledgment handling.

Donor not yet in Ayuna​

If the gift is from someone new, create the donor record first (or let the donation form prompt you to). Don't enter under "Anonymous" — that fragments your data.

Gifts from an organization​

When a business, foundation, or church sends a gift, record it against the organization, not against yourself or whichever staff member opened the mail. In the Record a Donation dialog, switch the donor type to Organization and pick the org.

A Donation Contact section appears below the organization:

  • If the organization has a primary contact on file, they're pre-filled automatically — the gift is credited to the organization with that person as the contact for receipts and follow-up.
  • You can switch to any other contact the organization has, or choose Someone else and enter a new contact's name and email.
  • If the organization has no contact on file, you must enter one (first name, last name, email — phone optional) before you can save. That person is added to the organization as its primary contact, so the next gift pre-fills automatically.

The staff member recording the gift is never attached to the donation or to the organization — the contact is always someone who actually belongs to the donor organization.

Gift dating​

Use the actual date the gift was made, not the date you're entering it. Year-end statements and tax deductions hinge on this.

After saving​

  • Receipt is generated and emailed (per the donor's preferences and your Thank-you & receipt email choice)
  • Donor's lifetime giving, donation count, and giving level update. A gift saved as Pending (a card or bank gift still waiting to clear) counts once it clears — see What counts toward lifetime giving
  • Journal entry is created and posted to the GL — for a hand-recorded gift (check, cash, or an ACH/wire that went straight to your bank) the entry is a simple two-line debit/credit for the full gift amount. Processing fees (booked at the configured estimate) only appear on gifts charged through the payment processor, so a recorded check never books a fee expense.
  • The gift appears on the donor profile and in reports

Editing a recorded gift​

Use Edit Donation for corrections (wrong fund, wrong date, typo in amount). The receipt does NOT regenerate automatically — if a corrected receipt is needed, void the original and resend.

Deleting a gift​

Reserved for true mistakes — a gift entered against the wrong donor, or a duplicate entry. Delete removes the donation entirely and unwinds everything it touched: the journal entry is deleted (or reversed, if it already synced to your accounting system), campaign and event totals recompute, and the donor's giving history updates.

  • Delete appears next to Refund in the campaign and event donation lists (manage mode), for manually recorded gifts only. It requires admin permissions.
  • Gifts charged through the payment processor can't be deleted — real money moved, so the record must stay. Use Refund a Donation for those.
  • Deletion is permanent and can't be undone. If money actually changed hands and needs to go back to the donor, refund instead — a refund keeps the gift on the books and records the money returned, which is what your auditors want to see.

If you refunded a manually recorded gift by mistake (when you meant to delete it), you can still delete it afterward — the delete cleans up the refund's bookkeeping too.

Importing donations from another system​

If you're moving onto Ayuna from another database, cash gifts come across on the Donations tab of the migration template (Administration → Data Migration → Download Template). Each row needs an amount greater than zero, a donation date, and a donor: a Contact ID or Email that matches a person, or an Organization.

Gifts the donor asked to keep anonymous​

Set the Anonymous column to Yes for any gift your old system flagged as anonymous. The gift is flagged anonymous, the same way it would be if the donor had chosen to give anonymously on your donation form. The donor stays on the record, so receipts and their giving history are unaffected. Leave the column blank (or enter No) for everyone else.

Only Yes or No is accepted. A row with anything else in this column fails rather than importing as not anonymous, so a typo can never publish the name of a donor who asked not to be named. Fix the value and re-upload the row from the failures download.