This chapter provides information that you need to think about before configuring and using CiviContribute. CiviContribute allows you to:
Throughout CiviCRM, the term contribution refers to any financial transaction or payment taking place in the system such as a donation, event fee payment or membership fee payment.
It is helpful to list out the types of contributions your organisation receives (or wants to receive), and identify which of those you want to track using CiviCRM. Then consider the following concepts and answer the key questions listed below before you begin to work with CiviContribute.
CiviContribute has a set of predefined fields to track contribution information. If you need to track more information about contributions, you can do this by defining new custom data fields. Custom data might be useful to further categorize your contributions or track additional information.
Write down all the information you want to track about your contributions, including reports (described later in this chapter), then compare your data needs to CiviCRM's predefined fields. An easy way to do this is is to look at the screen for adding a new contribution. A lot of useful functionality is built in to the core contribution fields so there's no point in duplicating them with custom fields, but your organisation may have specific needs that require custom fields.
If you do need to create custom fields to meet your needs, see the chapter Creating Custom Fields in the Understanding Your Data section.
CiviContribute categorises contributions by Financial Type. Examples of Financial Types include event fees, membership fees, donations and grants.
To aid integration with your accounting software, you can assign an Accounting Code to each Financial Type. This code is included when you export contributions for import into your accounting package.
New to the CiviContribute module in 4.3 is CiviAccounts which allows wider integration with accepted accounting principles and workflows typical to most organizations.
"Contribution Type Accounts" are now called "Financial Type Accounts". New to this administration page is a column named "Accounts" (see screen capture) which reflects the new Financial Account object associated with each type. Now, an organization may better manage and report in relation to both the income and expenses on a Financial Type.
For example, a fund raising dinner that charges $100/person may now allocate the true costs toward the relevant accounts i.e. $75 donation posted to the Income account named "Donations" and the $25 Cost of Sales account to "Event Fees".
As with the types, the list of associated preconfigured accounts will suit the needs of most organizations and may also be customized if your organization requires changes or additions.
You will want to check the list of Accounting Codes that are assigned to each account to ensure that they correspond with those used in your organization's chart of accounts.