Record a donation by hand

Gifts that arrive outside your donation form still belong in Donately, so your totals and donor records are complete. You can log a check that came in the post, or take a card payment over the phone.

Record a gift

Go to Donations and use Add Donation. The dropdown beside it offers:

• Card or PayPal, which charges the donor now.
• Cash, check or in-kind, for a gift you already have.

You can also start from a person: open a contact and use Add Donation there, which fills in the donor for you.

The panel that opens uses one of your published forms, so the fields match what you normally collect. You need at least one published form before you can record a gift this way.

Cash, check and in-kind gifts

Choose the Offline tab, then the Offline gift type:

• Cash.
• Check, with an optional Check number so you can reconcile later.
• In-kind, for donated goods or services. A description is required, and the amount you enter is the fair market value.

Fill in the donor and amount as usual and save. The gift appears in your donations list straight away and counts in your reports.

What happens to receipts

A recorded gift sends the donor a receipt, exactly as an online gift does, and it names the payment method: cash, check or in-kind. In-kind receipts leave out the tax-deductible sentence, since what was given was not money.

There is no per-entry switch to skip the receipt. If you are logging a batch of gifts that were already acknowledged, record them through a form that has receipts turned off. See Donation receipts.

Changing a gift afterwards

Open the donation and use Edit Donation. You can change the amount, the status, the campaign or fundraiser, the offline details, and the donation date, which is how you backdate a gift to when it actually arrived.

Cash and check donations can be deleted outright. Processed card donations cannot, because they represent a real transaction; refund those instead.

Two things the old dashboard did that this does not

Recurring gifts cannot be recorded by hand. The panel records one-time gifts only. For a donor who has committed to give monthly outside the platform, record each gift as it arrives, or ask them to set up a recurring donation through a form.

$0 donations are not accepted. Zero-value entries used to be a way to add someone as a contact. Instead, use a form that collects information without payment, which creates the contact record properly and keeps your donation metrics honest.

Who can do this

Recording donations needs an admin-level role on the account. Team members without those permissions won't be able to, even if they can see the page.