Add receipt numbers to acknowledgments (for Canadian customers)

In this article:

Overview

This feature is available to nonprofits in Canada, where the law requires that donation receipts include sequential receipt numbers.

NOTE: You can also enable receipt numbering for New Zealand and Australian currencies by setting the currency for your Little Green Light account to either currency.

This article describes how you can add receipt numbers to acknowledgment mailings or emails. Our approach assumes that you will be issuing acknowledgments throughout the year. 

Here's a high-level summary of how the Receipt Numbers feature fits into the acknowledgment process. As labeled in the diagram below, these are the steps that you will follow for using receipt numbers:

	1. Create an acknowledgment template and assign gifts to this template.
	2. In Draft Acknowledgments, review your acknowledgment mailing batch.
	3. Commit receipt numbers; each letter gets a sequential receipt number.
	4. Download your acknowledgment mailing.
	5. Mark the mailing as "Sent".

With that high-level summary in mind, let's go through how to use the feature in a bit more detail.

NOTE: This article assumes you have experience with LGL Acknowledgments, building reports, importing, and using LGL Appeals and LGL Mailings using merge fields.

Turn on the Receipt Numbers feature in your account

To access this feature, you have to be using the $ - CAD currency. To set your currency, go to Settings > Subscription settings > Gift settings. 

Now you can turn the feature on. Go to Settings > Subscription settings > Gift settings, and check the box to enable receipt numbers.

By default, the first receipt number issued is 1, but you can edit that to a higher number. It's likely you already have been using receipt numbers, so this allows you to pick up where you left off in your other system.

Set up your acknowledgment template

The next step is to set up one or more acknowledgment templates that use the [[receipt_number]] merge field. If you're using the LGL Editor, you can select this merge field from the Gift Acknowledgment section of the screen, or you can type the merge field (it must match character for character) directly into a Microsoft Word template.

Review and "commit" your receipt numbers

After assigning one or more gifts to your template, you'll see your acknowledgment mailing in the Acknowledgment mailing drafts tab. Here you will notice your mailing is waiting for you to commit the receipt numbers.

The Commit step may not seem necessary when you're looking at a single mailing. But if you have multiple draft mailings, they can't all use the same receipt numbers. The Commit step enables the draft mailing to "claim" the receipt numbers it needs.

You can commit the receipt numbers to this mailing by clicking the Commit? button for the draft mailing. Or, you can click into the mailing (by clicking on the mailing name on the far left), click on step 4 (shown below), and then click the Commit receipts button there.

Here is how you can get to Step 4 in the mailing:

...where you will see the Receipt Numbers section, which contains the Commit receipts button:

What happens to a receipt number once it has been committed?

Once you commit receipt numbers to a mailing, those receipt numbers are now "used", by definition, and cannot be applied to any other mailing. It is, however, still possible to edit the template you're using. To reiterate, after committing receipt numbers, you can edit the text of the letter, but you cannot change which receipt numbers are assigned to which acknowledgments. 

After committing receipt numbers, in your acknowledgment Draft mailings tab you'll see the receipt numbers that have been assigned, and you'll see the status listed as "Committed".

Here's what the receipt numbers status looks like in the fourth step of your mailing:

Once you commit the receipt numbers, that batch will be closed and will not accept any new gifts. If you assign a gift to that template, it will generate a new batch. In the screenshot below, you can see that the same template is being used for two mailings because the first mailing was committed and then a new gift was added to that template, creating the second mailing. 

As with regular acknowledgment mailings, you should mark them "Sent" once you've downloaded and put the letters in the mail.

Using receipt numbers in email acknowledgments

If you've set up LGL Email, you can send email acknowledgments right from LGL. And, you can use receipt numbers in your emails, just as you would for physical mailings.

You'll follow the same 5-step process outlined at the beginning of this article, except the very last step with an email is to queue it for delivery, which takes the place of the step in a physical mailing where you mark it "Sent".

In the Draft emails tab, click Commit to assign receipt numbers to your email acknowledgments.

Once the receipt numbers are committed, you can queue the email for delivery.

Searching for gifts by receipt number

You can search for gifts by receipt number in the Fundraising > Giving area.

Reporting on receipt numbers

To report on receipt numbers, it is possible to include the "Receipt Number" column in your report as you are selecting your columns for either a gifts report or a constituent report, as shown below.

You can choose the "Receipt Number" column as you are creating a gifts report:

Or you can select to add a "Receipt Number" column in the "Gifts" column custom options within a constituent report:

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