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Charitable Tax Receipt reporting questions

Meaghan Metke
$organization

Hello everyone!

It was great to see some of you last week at TLCC! For those of you who were not there in person, I presented an update on the progress of the Charitable Tax Receipt project. I'll work with Steve and Jen to find time to share that with all of you in a future regional meeting. 

Now, let's get to the business at hand. We're testing a couple of the reports we have designed as part of the charitable tax receipt project, and stumbled across a question regarding dates. If you have time to respond, I'd love to hear from you on any or all of the following:

  • I have created a new report called Charitable Tax Receipt Audit (see my sample image below). This is a very straightforward report, intended for finance folks or auditors, that will generate a sequential list of tax receipts issued within a tax year or date range. One of the optional parameters is obviously a date range, but I'm struggling a bit with which date is the right one to target. To help you understand the options, let me provide a little context. When the tax receipt maintenance tool is used to generate a group of receipts, there are a few background jobs that handle the work of creating and delivering tax receipts
    • One job writes all the tax receipt data records to the database
    • Another job generates the tax receipt PDFs
    • Another job creates the emails and queues them for delivery, or creates the print files, if the tax receipts are going to be printed
  • There are really two dates that seem like the most likely candidates to target in this report - the date the receipt records are written to the database, or the date the PDF files are created. Now, most of the time, these dates will be exactly the same, however, if you are kicking off a job late at night that includes thousands of receipts, or your backup starts in the middle of a job, or the Tessitura Processing Service (TPS) stops for any reason, then it is possible that the data records and the PDF files could have different creation dates. In other words, it is possible to write some or all of the data records, but not create PDF files until the next day. This should be an exception, not a rule, but if it does occur, I want to make sure that the data you're targeting with the report parameters, and what you see in the output of the report, makes as much sense as possible. So, remembering that this is an audit report that is going to finance folks or your auditors (there are other reports with more detail for non-auditor type folks) my questions are these:
    • Should the report parameter evaluate the date a receipt record was written to the database or the date the PDF file was created?
    • Which date should be displayed in the output, the date the receipt record was written to the database or the date the PDF file was created?

  • There is a second new report, called Charitable Tax Receipt Detail (see my sample image below). Think of this as the "all the things" report that should be viewed in Excel so you can sort and filter all the data to your heart's content. Much like the audit report, this report includes an optional data range parameter, so I have the same questions here that I do above:
    • Should the report parameter evaluate the date a receipt record was written to the database or the date the PDF file was created?
    • Which date should be displayed in the output, the date the receipt record was written to the database or the date the PDF file was created?
    • Since this is the "all the things" report, should we have parameters for both dates and then output both as well?

Thank you so much for your input!

Meaghan

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  • 0 $organization

    I am echoing what the others have said. Contribution date is really important. 

  • 0 $organization in reply to Jen Skelly

    Thanks everyone for the responses so far! My apologies for not being more clear with my question, let me try to clarify.

    I'm totally with you that contribution and payment dates are important, and those are very thoroughly tracked, I promise. When you generate tax receipts, you will absolutely be able to pick up those payments processed on Jan 5th, that are back dated to Dec 28th to match the postmark on the envelope. When that situation occurs, assuming you have your CONTRIBUTION PMT DATE CHANGE setting in T_DEFAULTS set to Yes, the contribution date and the payment date will both reflect the back dated date (Dec 28th), and the transaction will reflect Jan 5th. This is expected, and exactly what we coded for.

    I will also let you know that the Charitable Tax Receipt Detail report already includes a payment date range parameter and payment date is included in the output of that report. There's also a third report that I didn't mention above called Charitable Tax Receipt Payments that includes all kinds of payment info as well. Between those two report, I think you'll have access to all the contribution and payment data you want...but as always, if I've missed anything I'm happy to make adjustments.

    So...now that you know all of that, I'm still curious about dates related specifically to the tax receipt records. As I mentioned in my original post, most of the time there will only be one date linked to the creation of a receipt, but it is possible to write a receipt record to the database, and generate the corresponding PDF on different days. When that happens, which date is the one that matters most? Maybe my takeaway from all your responses so far is that I'm placing too much emphasis on the receipt date. It is an optional parameter that I thought might be helpful, but maybe not.

    , you mentioned above that you "...prefer the actual date and time the receipt was issued not when the pdf was generated." I just want to clarify that by "issued" you mean created in the database, not emailed to a constituent. Is that right?

    I know it's tough to give feedback on reports you've never seen or run, so I appreciate your willingness to try.

    Thanks again, everyone!

    Meaghan

  • 0 $organization in reply to Meaghan Metke

    Well that takes care of all of my comments, thanks Meaghan!  My thoughts would be to prioritize the creation date.  Since CRA dictates us to include the date the receipt was issued, it would be the original creation date, not necessarily the date it was sent (when different).

  • 0 $organization in reply to Meaghan Metke

    @meaghan yes created in data base. Also thank you for the clarification of the dates related to the receipt.  I am going to do some testing and speak with our finance team to be sure all will work well here.  I think it will, it would just be a change. 

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