Every gift is receipted straight away
When a donation is recorded — through a fundraising page, a monthly pledge charge, or the Record donation dialog — pplCRM emails the donor a donation receipt within moments, with a PDF attached. It shows your organization, the donor, the amount, the date and the payment method, and it carries a numbered reference beginning with A-. There is nothing to set up and nothing to turn on: it works in a brand-new workspace, and it works for organizations that issue no tax receipts at all.
Donors do not have to keep those emails. The receipt email also carries a link to the donor’s personal giving page, where every current receipt, acknowledgement, and year-end statement of theirs can be downloaded again — see the giving-portal section of Donations. A donor asking you to re-send a receipt usually just needs that link.
This document is deliberately not a tax receipt, and it says so on its face. It makes no claim about deductibility, so it needs no registration number, no authorized signatory and no mailing address. If a gift is later refunded or charged back, its receipt is cancelled along with any tax receipt covering the gift.
Set up tax receipting once
Official tax receipts are a separate document, and they are optional: a municipal campaign or a United States committee has no tax receipt to issue, and leaving this unconfigured is a perfectly normal resting state. If your organization does issue them, go to Workspace → Donations and choose your receipting regime: registered charity (CRA official donation receipts), federal political, or a provincial political regime (Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec). The regime decides what a receipt must contain and who may sign it. Then fill in your legal organization name and address, registration number, the signatory’s name and title, a receipt number prefix, and the place of issue. Preview receipt shows a SPECIMEN-watermarked sample before anything real is issued.
You can also upload a signature image, which is printed above the signatory’s name; a scanned facsimile is accepted under every regime here. Uploading one is your organization’s decision, not a requirement pplCRM imposes: if there is none on file the receipts page says so, and receipts still issue, printing the signatory’s name and the words “Authorized signature” without an image above them.
Check who may issue receipts
Only specific roles may issue contribution receipts — federally a registered agent or official agent; provincially the role your electoral authority prescribes; for charities, someone the charity authorizes. Confirm with your own counsel or electoral authority before issuing. Two special cases the app enforces: Ontario candidate campaigns are receipted by Elections Ontario (gifts are recorded here, not receipted here), and Quebec provincial receipts are issued by Élections Québec, so pplCRM never prints them. The year-end run
Official tax receipts go out once a year. On the Receipts & statements tab, pick a year and press Run year-end. Every donor with a successful gift in that year receives one document: a numbered official tax receipt covering their receiptable giving, where your workspace is set up to issue one and the donor has a mailing address on file — otherwise a giving summary, which lists every gift but is explicitly not an official receipt. Gifts your regime says are receipted by the electoral authority — Ontario candidate-campaign contributions — are never included on an official receipt issued here; a donor whose gifts were all of that kind receives the giving summary instead.
Donors with an email on file receive theirs automatically (large batches send in waves over a few hours); the rest are marked Print & mail for you to download. You are notified when the run completes, with a count of tax receipts, summaries and to-print documents. Rerunning a year only fills in donors who do not already have a document for it.
Issuing a tax receipt on request
A donor who wants their tax receipt before year end does not have to wait. Open the gift from the Donations grid (or the person’s Donations tab) and press Issue receipt. Tax receipts are numbered gap-free per year and immutable once issued: corrections go through cancel and replace, which cancels the old receipt (kept forever, marked cancelled, with your reason) and issues a successor that prints “cancels and replaces receipt No. …”. If a receipted gift is refunded or charged back, its receipt is cancelled automatically.
A tax receipt needs the donor’s mailing address — online checkout collects it, and the Record donation dialog requires it. An older gift recorded without one shows “needs donor address”: add an address to the donor’s household, then issue. The immediate donation receipt is unaffected; it needs no address.
The receipts list hides the per-gift donation receipts by default, because there is one for every gift and they would bury everything else. Turn on Show acknowledgements to see them.
When a PDF says “Retry PDF”
The PDF is drawn and filed a moment after the receipt itself is created, so a brand-new receipt shows a greyed-out PDF button for a few seconds. If the button turns into a red Retry PDF, that generation failed for good — usually something outside the receipt, such as file storage being briefly unreachable. The receipt is still valid and keeps its number; only the document is missing. Press Retry PDF and it is generated again. Retrying does not email the donor: once the PDF is there, download it and send it yourself if the original email never went out.
Receipts are records, not legal advice
pplCRM prepares documents from the details you configure; issuing legally valid receipts remains your organization’s responsibility. When in doubt, ask your counsel, the CRA, or your electoral authority. The sample receipts in a new workspace
A workspace that starts with sample donations also starts with a donation receipt for each of them, so the ledger reads the way the real thing behaves. A charity or church workspace adds a few sample official tax receipts on top, configured under the sample organization’s name and registration number. All of it is cleared when you remove the demo data — your own details replace them, and nothing real is ever issued under the sample ones. See Demo mode and sample data.
