Importing Sum Totals as Donation Records via the Import Tool

Overview

When importing Contacts and associated Transactions into Kindful, the best thing to do is to import each individual transaction for each contact record on its own individual row.

But what do you do if you don't have individual transaction records? Perhaps all you have is a list of Contacts with yearly totals. Below explains how you can import yearly totals, and what it means as you use Kindful in the future.

Linked Articles:

- Using the Import Data Tool

- Preparing Your Data for Import

- Import Data FAQ

Please Note 

This is a non-standard way of using Kindful. Please be sure you note to yourself and other future users of your Kindful account.

Each historical total is imported as an individual transaction. While it will help you get the historical donation amount correct on a particular record, it can present some challenges for historical reporting by year, tax summary generation, and more.

Recommendations

You will need to agree upon a few default transaction values for your Yearly Totals, and communicate this to all users of your system.

• Pick a Campaign or Campaigns and Clearly Name them as such. You might consider including HISTORICAL or HISTORICAL DONATION SUMS in the Campaign name for clarity in future viewing of these transactions.
• Pick a Transaction Type
• Choose a Date convention. For example, if you have yearly totals, the first day of the fiscal year. 
• Consider adding a transaction Note containing something like: "This is a historical total as of mm/dd/yy, and is not an individual transaction."

Example

• Campaign = "Historical Totals - General Campaign"
• Transaction Type = "Cash"
• Date = 01/01/12, 01/01/13, 01/01/14, 01/01/15, etc
• Note =  "This is a historical total as of mm/dd/yy, and is not an individual transaction."

Pros

• This allows for viewing and reporting on the lifetime total for each contact as time goes on
• You will be able to view and report upon historical giving totals for the entire organization

Cons

• This means you'll have transaction records in Kindful that are not actually transactions
• You'll have to remember and communicate with users of Kindful which transactions are really historical totals
• Those records will have something about them which is "wrong" - i.e. there will be a transaction type, date, etc., which is essentially filler data. For example, all historical giving may be as "Cash" transactions with the date of the import
• This may confuse/complicate auditing in the future