Donors are the people or organizations that support your mission. Contributions are the individual gifts they give.
A donor record stores relationship and communication information, such as name, household, contact details, preferences, notes, and giving history.
Use donor records to:
• Find a donor by name.
• Review giving history.
• Track related notes, tasks, calls, and attachments.
• Connect a donor to a household, organization, church, fund, or source.
• Add a profile photo from the camera icon on the initials circle at the top of the donor record. See Adding Profile Photos to People Records.
A donor record also stores an Email Receipt Requested preference: whether that donor wants an email receipt for their gifts. Set this once on the donor and every new contribution you create for them picks it up automatically (see below).
A donor's record can include an Event & Training Participations section, listing the events or training sessions that donor took part in. This section now shows up on every donor type, person, organization, and church, so you can see a person's event and training history directly on their donor record instead of only on an organization or church record.
CoolFocus is moving spouses off a single shared donor form and into separate person records that share a household. That is intentional — not a missing field.
Older systems often stored a spouse as name fields on the primary donor only (first name, last name, deceased flag). That was fine for envelopes and mailings, but it blocks work that needs a real person record:
• Their own giving history, soft credit, or payment methods
• Their own notes, tasks, calls, and attachments
• Their own communication preferences and portal access
• Clear search results when two people in a couple have similar names
• Features that keep being added at the individual person level
So CoolFocus prefers: one person per record, linked through a household (and, when needed, Relationships).
The household is what holds the couple or family together for shared context (home, joint giving story). Each person can still have different roles in your organization — for example one spouse is a board member and the other is a volunteer, or only one is a donor of record. That mix is hard to represent when the spouse is only name fields on someone else's form.
You are not forced to invent a complex workflow, but the recommended pattern is:
1. Create two people (or add Donor on each existing person), not one person with spouse name fields only.
2. Put both in the same household.
3. Set each person's Role in Household when it helps (for example Head and Spouse/Partner). See Household Member Roles.
4. If they do not share a home (separated, different addresses), keep one household each and link them on the Relationships tab instead. See Relationships and Households.
For a joint gift where only one person is the legal donor of record, use Sponsored Person/Soft Credit on the contribution so the spouse can still be recognized without merging two people into one form. See Soft Credit below.
Some records still show a Spouse Information section with the spouse's prefix, first, middle, and last name, suffix, and whether the spouse is deceased. That preserves spouse data that already lived directly on the donor rather than as a second person.
• The Donors list and donor search can include a Spouse Name column so similar names are easier to tell apart.
• If the spouse is marked deceased, a Deceased badge can appear next to the name.
• When the spouse is still stored this older, inline way (not as a separate household member), a Legacy badge can appear.
On a donor or contact with a Legacy spouse badge, the record's actions menu can offer Split Household. That opens a read-only preview of the primary person and the spouse details. It does not create a second person, create a household, or change any data yet — it is insight for the conversion path CoolFocus is building. To give the spouse their own record today, add them as a person and household member the normal way (search first so you do not duplicate).
If Spouse Information is missing on a specific donor: that often means this donor never had legacy inline spouse data, or the couple is already modeled as separate people in a household. Look at the household panel and the Relationships tab before assuming something is broken.
A donor record can be a Person, Organization, Church, or Gap Ministry underneath. If one was entered as the wrong type, for example a church that got created as a person, open the donor's actions menu, choose Change Type, and pick the correct type.
On plans without the Connect module (Pregnancy Center and Non Profit plans), this is where that action lives, since Donors displays every person-family type in place. Change Type requires edit permission on the donor record. See Contacts and Organizations for the full breakdown of how this works on Connect plans.
Filter the Donors list by the Lapsed Donor field to find supporters who haven't given this year:
• LYBUNT (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year): gave last year but not yet this year.
• SYBUNT (Some Year But Unfortunately Not This Year): gave in a prior year but not yet this year.
See Finding Records with Filters for how to add this condition. You can also save a lapsed-donor filter as a segment; see Saving and Sharing Segments.
A donor's year-to-date giving total, and every report built on it (Donors Listing, LYBUNT, SYBUNT, and the {{ YearToDateTotal }} merge field on statements and receipts), is calculated against the Current Year Begin and Current Year End dates set at Settings > Giving Info.
Those two dates do not advance on their own at the start of a new year. An administrator has to update them and save. If they're left pointing at a period that already ended, year-to-date totals keep being calculated against that closed period, so gifts received since then won't show up in YTD figures.
To make this easier to catch, the Current Year section of Settings > Giving Info now shows a notice when the configured period has already ended. It names the closed period, explains that YTD totals are still being calculated against it, and offers a button to roll the dates forward to the period that contains today. Saving the form after rolling forward triggers CoolFocus to recalculate YTD totals for the new period.
Check this setting near the start of each fiscal year if your organization's YTD numbers look low or unchanged.
LYBUNT/SYBUNT, the Donors list, and merge fields like a giving-year total all read from your organization's current year setting, not just today's calendar date. That setting lives at Settings > Give Settings > Giving Info, under Current Year Begin and Current Year End.
These two dates do not advance on their own. If nobody updates them after a fiscal year closes, every year-to-date total keeps computing against the old, closed period, and gifts received since then stop counting toward it.
To help catch this, that settings page now shows a notice once the configured year has ended, telling you the closed period and the period that should replace it. Click Roll forward to fill in the next dates, then save to recalculate year-to-date totals across the Donors list and reports.
A contribution is a single donation transaction. It records the amount, date received, tender type, fund, donor, and related campaign or source context.
Use contribution records to:
• Track gifts by fund or campaign.
• Review receipt and tax history.
• Reconcile donations with payments or batches.
• Report on giving by date range.
A Contribution Batch is a data-entry workspace for logging several contributions at once, such as a stack of checks from a mailing or a Sunday collection, instead of opening a separate create form for each gift.
The batch header lets you set shared defaults that seed each new row, including a default Date Received, Tender Type, Amount, and Fund. These defaults now correctly carry onto each contribution row you start from the batch, so you don't have to re-enter them on every line.
Batch entry rows also include a Check # field. Unlike the sticky header defaults, the check number does not carry forward from row to row, since each check has its own number, but it can now be entered directly on each row without opening the individual contribution.
Each contribution has its own Request Email Receipt checkbox that decides whether that gift gets an emailed receipt. When you pick a donor on a contribution, CoolFocus sets this checkbox to match that donor's Email Receipt Requested preference automatically. Clearing the donor field, or leaving it blank, unchecks it.
You can still override the checkbox on the individual contribution after it fills in. For example, a donor who normally wants receipts can decline one on a specific gift, such as an anonymous or in-kind entry, without changing their standing preference.
Contributions, pledges, in-kind gifts, and recurring contributions all include a "Sponsored Person/Soft Credit" field. Use this field to give a related contact recognition (a soft credit) for a gift, even though they are not the donor of record who actually made the payment (the hard credit).
Setting this field does not change who the recorded donor is on the gift. It only adds a secondary contact associated with the gift for stewardship and reporting purposes, separate from the donor's own giving record.
Common uses include:
• Gifts made through a donor-advised fund (DAF), where the DAF is the actual payer and holds the hard credit, but the individual advisor who recommended the gift should receive soft credit.
• Matching gifts, where a company or organization makes the payment but the employee or individual who prompted it should be recognized.
• Crediting a spouse or other household member for a joint gift.
• Recognizing the person a sponsorship gift was made on behalf of.
To enter a soft credit, search for and select the contact in the "Sponsored Person/Soft Credit" field on the contribution, pledge, in-kind gift, or recurring contribution record. That contact can then be reported on separately from the donor of record.
A donor who was only ever entered as a Sponsored Person/Soft Credit, and never as the donor of record, used to have no way to see those gifts except by running a report. Their Contributions, Pledges, and Recurring Contributions tabs now list both:
• Gifts they gave directly, as the donor of record.
• Gifts where they are the Sponsored Person/Soft Credit on someone else's gift.
A Credit Type column on these tabs tells the two apart, showing Direct for a gift the donor actually gave, and Soft Credit for a gift where they are only the sponsored person. Tab counts and totals include both kinds. To see only one kind, filter by the Sponsored Person/Soft Credit field.
In-kind gifts are not included in this change: an in-kind gift still only appears on the donor of record's own In-Kind Gifts tab, not on the sponsored person's.
When a contribution is tied to a CoolPay payment, its timeline can include the payment's processing history, such as when it was processed, failed, or refunded, alongside a "Refund Recorded" entry any time the contribution is refunded. This applies whether the gift is a one-time contribution or part of a recurring contribution. See Refunding a Payment for details on issuing a refund.
When a contribution came from a CoolPay payment, the contribution record now shows that payment's context directly, so you don't have to look up the separate payment record to see it:
• Processing Fee: the fee taken by the processor. This uses a manually entered fee value when one exists, and otherwise falls back to the fee CoolPay reported for the payment.
• Donor Paid Fee: whether the donor covered the processing fee.
• Payment Method, Card Brand, and Last 4 Digits: how the donor paid.
• Payment Status and Payment Date: the underlying CoolPay payment's status and when it occurred.
• Net: the amount after the processing fee, so you can see what actually settles.
• CoolPay Account: a read-only field showing which CoolPay sub-account the payment settled through. Most organizations only have a single "Admin" account, so this typically shows the same value for every contribution. See Payments and Payouts for how this is used in payout reconciliation.
These fields appear in the contribution grid and are available for reporting and payout-related exports. They are blank on contributions that were not made through CoolPay (such as cash or check gifts entered manually).
The contribution grid also shows Fund as one of its columns by default now, so you can see and filter by fund without opening each contribution.
A contribution created from a recurring contribution now shows a read-only Covers Period field on its detail view, indicating which billing period the charge is for, such as "May 2026" for a monthly gift or "Week of May 19, 2026" for a weekly gift.
This matters most when a charge is collected later than usual, for example a held payment that finally succeeds a few days into the next month. Without this field, a May charge collected on July 2nd could look like a duplicate July gift. Covers Period makes clear which period the money actually applies to.
• Covers Period only appears on contributions linked to a recurring contribution. One-time gifts don't show this field at all.
• It is read-only and for reference; it is not a filterable or reportable column.
Use this field when a donor asks why they were charged more than once in a month, or when reconciling recurring gifts, to confirm each charge covers a distinct period instead of assuming a duplicate.
When setting up Giving for the first time, use bulk import for existing donors and contributions instead of adding them one by one. Review field mappings carefully so names, funds, dates, and amounts are consistent.
• Households
• Relationships
• Household Member Roles
• Adding Profile Photos to People Records
• Gift Receipts
