Payment reports are changing...

***Update 5th June - get help on formatting the reports here***

*Update 29th May - the reports have now changed  - read more*

As a lot of you will know, we've not provided the best of service for payment reports over the last couple of months. They have been available again for over a month, we've said sorry, and now we're trying to make them better again.

Reports will soon be much quicker to generate

So that's good news for those of you who spend a lot of time staring at the Justgiving dog and the dove of data...(trust me, we do know how you feel).

Is there a catch?

Unfortunately, yes. To enable us to generate these reports quicker, and to minimise any effect they may have on the site in general, from Thursday 29th May, you will no longer be able to customise the reports before you generate them.

That means no column selections and no column renaming.

You will only be able to download a report in Excel and CSV with every column selected (apart from two that will no longer be included)*. Just like the ones below:

 Download example_donation_payment_report.xls

**UPDATE 28th May - we now have a Gift Aid report example too**

(The Gift Aid report no longer includes a "message from donor" column, and the "Net Donation minus Estimated VAT" column [BS] has been changed to "Net Gift Aid minus Estimated VAT" so you can add up that column and it will give you the approximate total paid to your charity.)

 Download example_gift_aid_payment_report.xls  

We know that this is going to make some of your lives a bit harder again. So we're trying our best to build something that will replicate the custom functionality in Excel, because this change is going to happen soon...

Since it is *urgent* for us to implement this to ease the strain on our servers from so many reports and ensure we don't have to turn them off, all reports will come like this from Thursday 29th May.

As I said, we are working every day to try and find/build another way of providing the same functionality, and we'll keep you updated on this.

The technical reason

Up to now, we have allowed you to customise the reports to include any number of columns, and column names. This meant that every report was generated on the fly - searching the database for all the info from those select columns.

Now that we will give you a fixed report, we can index the database so that it accesses the information much quicker - more than 50% quicker, in fact.

Are we providing any help?

As above, we're trying as best we can to minimise the work that you will need to do, so watch out for some webinars, videos and help sheets in the next week...

More info on our finance processes can be found here.

*the two columns that will no longer appear in this report are "Gift Aid Payment Reference" and "Gift Aid Payment Reference Date", normally columns BR and BS. They have been taken out as they meant the reports were much slower to download - and since they would only include data 6-8 weeks after a payment report (when Gift Aid is repaid) we thought they were not essential.

Comments

[Liz Carnell]

Justgiving is a great service but unfortunately the new method of reporting donations is hopeless.

I've all but given up trying to extract the very basic information we need and I'd strongly urge Justgiving to abandon the new system and to reinstate the original simple reporting form for those who prefer it.

Small charities, (ie with incomes up to £500,000) who probably make up the bulk of your customers, don't need elaborate reporting systems.

We need the basics like:
Date of donation
Name of donor
Address of donor
Email address of donor
Amount of donation,
Whether donation is gift aided
Is the amount monthly or a single donation.

We don't want page after page of spreadsheet containing sections which are of no use to us.

Maybe you could call the old system Justgiving Lite for smaller charities and then provide the more cumbersome system for charities with large fundraising departments which have the time to get to grips with it.