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.
Filter the Donors list by the Lapsed Donor field to find supporters who haven't given this calendar year:
LYBUNT (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) - gave last calendar year but not yet this year.
SYBUNT (Some Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) - gave in a prior calendar 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 & Sharing Segments.
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.
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.
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.
CoolPay Account - which connected CoolPay account processed the payment. This is a read-only column, useful for organizations with more than one CoolPay account.
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.
Recurring gifts don't always collect on a tidy schedule. A monthly charge that was held or retried can settle in a later month than the one it was originally due for, which can make a donor's statement or a staff member's view of the account look like a duplicate charge when it isn't.
To make this clear, a contribution created from a recurring gift now shows a read-only Covers Period field on its detail view, for example "May 2026". This tells you which billing period that specific charge pays for, even if the date it was actually collected was later.
Covers Period only appears on contributions linked to a recurring contribution. One-time gifts don't show this field.
It is read-only and cannot be edited or filtered on.
If several charge attempts collected around the same time, CoolFocus matches the contribution to the correct attempt to determine its period.
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.
