Accounting for a charity - issue a receipt without an invoice and other issues

eliteacchk

I have a client who wants to migrate to Wave. As captioned, it is a registered charity here in Hongkong.

For receiving donations, the accounting is simple, Accounting > Transactions > journal entry takes care of the bank deposits from donors. I can even create a donor entry as a (heaven forbid) customer!

BUT

1) How do I create a receipt for the donor without creating an invoice? Ideally, the charity would like to email the receipt to the client and cut down the admin time used with issuing and sending out the receipts.

2) How to customize the receipt to include standard wordings? By law, the charity must include wording on the receipt that the amount is tax deductible.

I know you can do that with Invoices but why not on receipts?

dpieski

I had this same question. I was looking into using invoicing for the donation and the nonprofit wording could be put in the footer of the Invoice. The item in the invoice is a "Donation" and attached to my "Donation" account that is an "Other Income" type. When I make the Invoice I click the save and mark paid.

Ultimately I end up with the Donation amount in my Donation Account.
Then the Donation amount in my Accounts Receivable.
Then the Donation amount in my Cash on Hand.

I was wondering if there is a better way to do this.

Ryan_W

Hey @eliteacchk and @dpieski, I think the reason you're running into these types of limitations is because Wave's primary/target customer is a small business owner, who's using invoices to track income (feeding directly into their A/R, generating Profit and Loss reporting, etc.) and make money from what they're selling.

So, even though there's a degree of support at the transaction/account level, and even upon set up (like setting up as a non-profit organization), it's not going to be as robust for tracking donations in a way that you would want it to look as a charity, for example. The receipts issue is a good example: the generation of receipts in Wave is explicitly tied to the creation and payment of an invoice; the assumption is that this is the logical flow of events in a small business owner's workflow, and it's all tied together to make it as easy as possible to record payments for sales and issue receipts accordingly. That's why you can't just pull a receipt template out of thin air; the prevailing notion is "this receipt is a result of something I made money from".

I just want to be honest about where there will be by-design limitations in your respective cases, rather than trying to convince you how to fit a square peg in a round hole. Hope that helps give a bit more context!

Jewels

Has there or will there be any updates to this function for Charity Donations for NPO's

Barsin

Hey there @Jewels

To be honest this is something we have not heard of that is coming down the pipeline. So I do apologize if Wave's current format is unable to meet your organization's needs at this time. We appreciate you reaching out about this in our community forum!