How Do I Send Annual Giving Statements?

Sending Receipts is a part of gift processing for most organizations, but what about sending Year-End Statements to your givers? Some donors may choose to only receive Annual Statements for their giving, so this may be the one time that you are communicating with them about their giving for the year. This article outlines the prep and execution needed to complete the Annual Giving Statement process. 

Table of Contents 

1. Creating Your Statements 
2. Sending Statements in Bulk
3. Sending Single Annual Statements 
4. Adding or Removing Statements Individually from the Donor Portal 
5. Statement History 

1. Creating Your Statements

Creating your annual statements is not tremendously different from creating other receipts. In fact, you'll use the same receipt editor. Many organizations choose to create and send paper receipts for annual statements, but you can certainly send email receipts if you prefer. Below are three Support Articles that can provide further guidance on formatting your exact Receipts needed. 

• To learn more about customizing Gift Receipt Templates, check out this Support Article. 
• To learn more about creating a paper Receipt template, check out this Support Article. 
• To learn more about creating an Email Receipt Template, check out this Support Article. 

The key when creating your template will be to use the "multiple gifts per receipt" option. This will combine several Gifts from the same Contact on one receipt. You'll want to use the "Gift Table" in your receipt to display all of the gift data for your donors. 

You'll also have the ability to include fields for totals, with separate merge tags for the total deductible amount and the total non-deductible amount. These fields will calculate totals for all Gifts included in each receipt. These values cannot be inserted directly into the Gift Table but can be included in a text box below or near the Gift Table as appropriate.

Once you've created your template, then you'll be ready to send out your statements!

2. Sending Statements in Bulk

To send out your annual statements to all of your donors for the previous year, you'll want to create a Gift query. To find all Gifts for a particular year, you can use the following criteria: Gift Date --> Between --> 1/1/20xx | 12/31/20xx. For example, to find all Gifts from the year 2020, your query parameter would look like this:

You can add additional parameters as needed to your query to identify ONLY the Gifts you'd like to include in annual statements. If some donors receive mailed statements and others receive them via email, you'll need to create two separate queries to identify each group. We recommend using Tags to identify receipting preferences since Contact Tags can be used as parameters in Gift queries.

Once you have built your query (be sure to give it a clear name, like "2020 Annual Statements - Mail"), run the query by clicking on "View Results." On your results page, you can click the checkbox next to each gift to receipt specific gifts. To select all gifts on the first results page, click on the checkbox next to Contacts.

To select all gifts from your query output (beyond what is on the results page), click "Select all X items in query results."

Then click on the Actions menu in the upper right and select "receipt Gifts" from the drop-down.

This will bring up the Receipt Gifts form. Give your export a clear name, like "2020 Annual Statements," so it will be easy to find in your downloads. You'll see that the Receipt Date field defaults to the current date, which is great for sending everyday receipts, but generally not preferred for annual statements. To avoid overwriting the existing Receipt Date values on all of the Gifts included in your query, you can delete the value and leave the Receipt Date field blank.

Make sure that you have all checkboxes selected, as you may have a mix of receipted and unreceipted Gifts and you'll want to ensure that all of the Gifts in your query are included in your receipting run. Select the correct export option for the type of statements you are generating (PDF for mail, Email for...well, email) and then you can select the correct template. 

You also have the option to show this receipt in the Donor Portal. This means a donor will be able to log into their Donor Portal and view a copy of this receipt. If you check this box you will then be prompted to enter a Statement Title. This is what the donor will see in their Donor Portal. For this example, the word "Mail" was removed from the Statement Title that will display in the Donor Portal. 

Note: The option "Show in Donor Portal" is only available for the Email, HTML, and PDF export options. 

Select "Refresh Preview" to update the Preview Receipt that displays below the Receipt Options. 

Once you have made your selections, click "Save" to start generating statements. Email statements will start sending right away. You will be able to download and print PDF statements once the process is complete. 

3. Sending Single Annual Statements

Your donors may ask for a replacement statement. In these cases, you can send a single annual statement directly from a Contact record. Just navigate to the donor's record, click on the Giving tab, then click on the three dots in the upper right of the Giving section to open the menu and select "Annual Giving Statement."

This will open a form where you can select and re-send an annual statement, either by mail or email. Select the method you'd like to use (PDF, email, or HTML), and then select the correct template for your statement. Use the "Statement Year" drop-down to set the year for your giving statement; this will include all Gifts dated within the select year on the generated statement. Note that if you have chosen to exclude certain types of Gifts from your annual statements, they may be included on a statement generated in this way. If you have very specific business rules for annual statements, then you may need to generate your statement from a Gift query instead.

Just as when initially sending Annual Statements via a gift query, you have the option to "Show In Donor Portal". This will give the donor the option to view and download the statement from their Donor Portal. 

If you are sending via email, select the correct email address from those available on the Contact record. Use the Preview option to confirm that your template is correct, and then click "Run" to send the email statement or generate a download for your PDF receipt.

4. Adding or Removing Statements Individually from the Donor Portal

If a donor requests to see a previous giving statement, you can choose to individually push a statement to their donor portal (or remove one if there is an error) by selecting the statement on their record, and choosing to add/remove from the donor portal.

5. Statement History

If you want to see your statement run history, you can head over to the receipting tool and select receipting history. There, you can see the statement runs you've done.

If you select the eye to the right of a statement run you can view the statistics of that run AND you can also add it to the donor portal (in case you missed it the first time) in Virtuous Giving or Raise Donors.

For more information on Receipting and viewing history or statistics around receipting check out this article on our receipting tool.