Gift types

Every gift has a type. It’s how you filter and sum giving by channel in the Gifts Report and The Grid.

The built-in types

Type	Use for
Cash	Physical cash.
Check	A cheque, whether posted to you or to your organisation.
Credit Card	Card gifts processed outside Karani’s online giving.
EFT (Bank Transfer)	Direct debit, ACH, standing order — bank-to-bank.
Direct Personal Gift	A gift given straight to you rather than through your organisation.
Online	Gifts through your Karani giving link. Applied automatically.
Matching Gift	An employer match. Record separately from the original gift so you can see how much matching is worth.
Soft Credit	Credit for a gift someone influenced but didn’t personally give — a donor-advised fund, a family foundation, a spouse’s employer.
Stock	Appreciated securities, recorded at their value on the date of transfer.
Cash/Check (Unspecified)	When your organisation’s report doesn’t distinguish. Common in imports.

Your organisation may have added its own types, which appear in the same dropdown.

Soft credits

Soft credit is the type people most often get wrong. Use it when someone should get relationship credit for a gift that didn’t come out of their own pocket:

• A gift from a donor-advised fund that Jane Smith recommended — record the gift against the fund, and a soft credit against Jane.
• A gift from a family foundation that a board member directs.

The point is that next time you talk to Jane, her record shows the relationship, without her personal giving total being inflated by money that came from elsewhere.

Soft credits still count in totals

Karani sums soft-credited gifts alongside everything else. If you record both the original gift and a soft credit for the same money, your total counts it twice. Use the display only flag on one of them if you want the record without the double count — see Adding a gift.

Matching gifts

Record the match as a separate gift with type Matching Gift, dated when the match arrived.

Against which contact depends on what you want to see. Recording it against the individual donor keeps their household’s true impact visible; recording it against the employer keeps their personal giving figure clean. Pick one convention and stick to it.

Choosing a type on import

The gifts importer can map a column from your CSV to gift type. If your organisation’s export uses its own vocabulary — “EFT”, “ACH”, “Bank” — normalise it in the spreadsheet before importing, so you end up with one type rather than three.

If your source data has no type information, Cash/Check (Unspecified) is the honest choice.