Upload Donations takes a spreadsheet of gifts — a campaign list, an event's pledges, donations collected outside the system — cleans it up, and puts the rows on the Submissions page of an import form. From there they are matched to families and imported like any other submission.
Nothing reaches a family until you import it. Uploading adds the donations to the Submissions page only. They are not in your families, and no bill or payment exists, until they are imported there.
Upload Donations is part of the Premium package. Reach out to tech support to get it added to your account. It also needs permission to edit forms and to add transactions.
Once it is on, the page is under Tools → Upload Donations.
Preparing the File
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|
| Format | CSV, up to 5 MB and up to 2,000 donations |
| Required in every row | Last name, amount and date |
| Worth including | Email, phone and address — they are what match a donation to the right family |
| Saving from Excel | File → Save As → CSV UTF-8, so Hebrew and accented characters survive |
A blank template is offered on the upload step. Every row is added as a successful gift, or as a pledge if you mark it unpaid, so remove declined, failed and refunded rows before uploading.
The Five Steps
Pick the import form that will hold the donations, or create one with New import form. An import form is a holder for uploaded rows: it has a name, a department and a family category, and it never appears on your website or accepts submissions from anyone. Families imported through it are added to that family category, which is what makes a campaign easy to find later.
Under Lists sent to this form you can see everything uploaded to it so far.
Choose the CSV. The file is checked immediately, and the row and column counts are shown. If values arrive as question marks, the file was saved as plain CSV rather than CSV UTF-8; re-save it and upload again.
Say what each column holds, with sample values from your own file beside each one. Last name, Amount and Date are required; the rest is optional. Columns are matched for you where the headings are recognizable, and a form remembers the mapping you used last time.
Four choices, each of which can apply to the whole file or be read from one of its columns:
| Setting | Controls |
|---|
| Paid | Whether the rows are paid gifts or pledges |
| Subcategory | What the donations are recorded against |
| Payment method | Check, cash and so on, with check numbers taken from the file when it has them |
| Solicitor | Who the gift is credited to, per row or for the whole file |
The preview is the file as it will be added: a summary line across the top — how many rows, the total, how many paid and how many pledges — and every row beneath it.
| Flag | Means |
|---|
| Error (red) | The row cannot be added until it is fixed or excluded — a missing amount, an unreadable date |
| Warning (yellow) | Worth a look, and fine to add as it is — an odd zip, a name that had to be split, a donation that looks like one already uploaded |
Filter by Errors, Warnings or All, and click the information icon on a row to read what it says. Edit turns the preview into a spreadsheet where values can be corrected, rows excluded, and changes undone before saving. Nothing is written back to your file.
When no errors remain, Add to Form Submissions sends the rows.
After the Upload
The last screen confirms how many donations and how much was added, and offers Go to Submissions. There each donation is matched to a family and imported, exactly like a submission from a web form. Matching and importing are unchanged by this feature — see reviewing and importing web form submissions.
Need to correct a whole file? On step 1, Redo on that list replaces it with a corrected file. Redo is only available if none of its submissions has been imported.
You can leave the wizard at any point and come back to the same step — the upload is kept as a draft. Cancel upload discards it and starts again.
ADVANCEDWhere the file goes
The CSV is held on the server, encrypted, for 30 days so a later query can be checked against what was uploaded, and then deleted automatically. It is never stored in the database, and the submissions carry only a reference to it.