5. Donations & Reservations

The controls that handle money: suggested giving amounts, what a donation is recorded against, recurring gifts, the processing-fee offer, guest reservations and their promo codes, paying now or later, and the credit card section. Most of them arrive with the Donation or Event registration template.

Suggested Giving Amounts

The amount control sits at the top of the Payment Information group, labeled Amount. On the canvas it shows as a gray strip reading "Choice list — options are set in Properties", because the individual buttons are not rendered in the editor.

Selecting it fills the properties panel with Choice list Properties:

The Amount choices dialog

Edit options… opens a dialog titled Amount choices, holding one row per button with four columns:

The Amount choices dialog. Boxed: the per-row controls, and the “Other” option with its label field.

A title typed by hand — Patron, Sponsor a family — is kept, including when the value beneath it is edited afterwards.

Each row also carries four buttons:

• Hide other fields (the eye with a slash), which opens a rule for that choice. See the Advanced note below.
• Move up and Move down, which set the order the buttons appear in. The arrows are disabled on the first and last rows.
• Remove, which deletes the row.

+ Add a choice appends an empty row. A new list arrives containing 180, 360 and 540.

Below the rows, Offer an "Other" option so donors can enter their own controls whether a free-entry box appears after the buttons, and a further field sets the label shown on it. With the option off, the donor must choose one of your amounts.

The dialog closes with Done or Cancel. Done counts as a single undo step, so undoing after it reverses the whole screenful rather than each value in turn.

Purpose and Recurring Gifts

Two dropdowns sit below the amount in the Payment Information group.

Purpose records what the donation is for. Its options are the categories and subcategories configured in your system, so nothing is entered on the form; a missing option means a missing subcategory. The dropdown is optional — where every donation through a form goes to the same place it can be deleted, and the destination set once under Settings → Where submissions go, covered in Settings & Putting the Form on Your Website.

Recurring option offers One time donation or Monthly recurring. A monthly gift charges the same card on the same day each month until it is stopped.

Donor Processing Fee

The Donor Processing Fee preset adds a tick box inviting the donor to cover the card processing fee, so the organization receives the full amount. Add it from Presets, then open its Fee Options from the properties panel:

The fee is charged on the donor's total, so the percentage cannot be left blank; the dialog says so until a valid value is entered.

Guest Reservations

A guest reservation lets visitors choose how many of each item they are reserving — adult and child places for a dinner, for example — with each line priced and totaled. It is how an event form takes payment.

It arrives with the Event registration template, which asks for the reservation items and their prices during setup, before the editor opens. On any other form, add Guest Reservation from Groups.

What visitors see

A table with one row per item. Each row shows the item's title, a quantity box starting at 0, the price per place, and a line total (quantity × price). Headings appear as bold rows and dividers as rules between groups of items. When the list has more than one line, a Total row sums the quantities and amounts.

When the form also has a promo code, a Discount column appears, showing the discount on each line. See Promo codes below.

The guest group's properties

Selecting the guest reservation list shows Guest group properties:

Setting up the items

The Options dialog has three parts.

Reservation items come from is a type-ahead picker of subcategories. Only active subcategories, in active categories, with at least one active item are offered. Every line in the list is drawn from the subcategory chosen here.

Column headings holds the text shown above each column of the visitor's table. The defaults are Type, Number, Amount, Discount and Total; change them to suit the event, for example Ticket and Quantity.

The list of lines is a table with these columns:

Each line has Move up, Move down and Remove buttons. Below the table, + Item adds a line, + Heading adds a bold heading row within the list, and + Divider adds a rule. Headings and dividers break a long list into groups, such as Dinner and Sponsorships.

Reservation Amount and Total Amount

Two presets display running totals as the visitor fills in the table. Reservation Amount shows the reservation total, and Total Amount shows the final total. Both are added from Presets and are calculated, not entered.

Promo codes

A promo code gives a discount on the guest reservation. It applies to guest reservation lines only, so a form with a promo code but no guest reservation cannot be saved. The message reads "Promo Code needs a Guest Group on the form to discount against."

Add Promo Code from Presets. It places a field labeled Promo Code on the form, with the placeholder Enter promo code. Select it and open Promo Codes in the properties panel to set up the codes.

The dialog lists the existing codes with their Code, Discount and Expires date, each with Edit and remove buttons. Beneath the list is the form for adding one:

Add code saves it to the list; when editing an existing code the button reads Update code, with a Cancel beside it. The dialog refuses an empty code, a code already in the list, a percentage outside 0–100, and a negative amount.

How the discount is worked out

Only lines without No promo ticked are counted.

• % off takes that percentage off the total of the eligible lines.
• $ off takes that amount off each place on the eligible lines, not once per order. A $10 code on three adult places gives $30 off.

The discount is spread across the eligible lines and shown per line in the Discount column.

What the visitor sees

Codes are matched without regard to capitals, so chai18 works for CHAI18. A valid code shows Discount and Final Amount beneath the field. An unknown code shows "Invalid promo code", and an expired one "Promo code has expired".

Paying Now or Later

The Payment Method preset lets the visitor choose between paying by card now or paying later — by check, at the door, by mail, and so on. Add it from Presets.

There are two methods, and they are fixed:

Switching back to the card method shows the credit card section again.

Renaming the methods

Select the control and open Edit options… in its properties panel. The dialog, titled Payment methods, notes that "Payment methods are fixed. You can rename them and reorder them." The values cannot be changed, methods cannot be added or removed, and there is no "Other" option.

The label visitors see comes from the Description column, not Title. Rename the pay-later method to match how you collect payment — Pay by check, Pay at the door, Mail a check. A Memo appears on its own line beneath a method, which suits instructions such as Make checks payable to Congregation Example.

The Credit Card Section

Credit Card Information adds the whole card section in one action:

• Card number
• Expiry month and year, as two short fields separated by a slash
• Security code
• Name on card
• Billing address and zip

It also includes a Use contact info above tick box, which copies the name, address and zip already entered elsewhere on the form into the billing fields. When the form has a Payment Method control, this section is shown only while the card method is selected.