Inaccurate Contribution Summary Report

[John Richardson]

When I create a report from the Contributions Summary Template for "This Year" it displays a total number of contributions and total amount that exceeds the actual numbers as reported in the Find Contributions search for the same period (December 1 - January 31).

It appears that the report is counting the same donations more than once, possibly because of how we use Soft Credits. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a workaround? I want to be able to use the report in a scheduled job to send to managers, so I really would like to figure out how to make it accurate.

Any ideas out there?

[joanne]

What version of CiviCRM are you using?

Clicking on the year in the left column should take you to the detailed contribution report.  From that you should be able to determine which contributions are being counted twice.

That might help you to work out how to set the filters on the summary report to avoid the double counting.

If you still can;t get it too work, please post again with the details of the filtering you have tried.

[John Richardson]

Thanks, Joane. I've been wrestling with it for a week  The detail report says that "contributions OR Soft Credit" is equal to "contributions only", so that would suggest that there are NO soft credits being calculated. The only filters I have set in the Summary are "Completed" status and date range (either "this year" or 1.1.14 to 12.31.14, doesn't matter, same result).

The detail report allows the setting for "contributions only", the summary does not. The calculation error exists in both the summary report and the detail report. There are more contributions calculated than actual, i.e. there are a greater number of completed transactions being counted and there is a greater total amount being calculated in both reports.

The reports show the correct number of "rows" as compared with the "Find Contributions" list, but the total number of calculated donations is greater in the reports than the Find Contributions list.

There doesn't seem to be a way of filtering out Soft Credits entirely. If that's the problem. Not sure. If I display the column for Soft Credits in the report and subtract the total from the total contributions, it still doesn't equal the correct YTD numbers. So, whatever is going on, it is not simply counting every soft credit, only some, in the totals.

[John Richardson]

Oh, sorry. I am using 4.5.4.

[joanne]

I think I know what is going wrong.

You are right it is to do with soft credits, but it is multiple soft credits for the one contribution that cause the problem.

eg.

Contribution	Soft credit to person 1	Soft Credit to person 2	Soft Credit to person 3	Amount this contribution SHOULD add to Contribution summary report	Amount this contribution DOES add to Contribution summary report
$5	$5	-	-	$5	$5
$12	$5	$7	-	1x$12 = $12 (or perhaps$5 +$7 = $12)	2x$12 = $24 (or perhaps $12 +$12= $24)
$25	$5	$10	$10	1x$25 = $25 (or perhaps $5+$10+$10 = $25)	3x$25 = $75 (or perhaps $25+$25+$25= $75)

[John Richardson]

Okay. Yes, that was my guess. I don't see a way to correct the problem. Is there a way to filter out soft credits entirely from the summary report? There should be. Furthermore, is my organization using soft credits in a wrong way that leads to this problem?

Joanne, thank you so much. Can you think of a workaround? I just want to provide to my managers an accurate YTD report by month of total income, and I want to be able to schedule it to be mailed periodically.

Any thoughts on this are greatly appreciated!

[joanne]

You need to report this as a bug  (point to this post in the jira issue and then come back here and post the link to the jira issue)

The quickest way to get it fixed would be to provide a PR with the fix yourself (if you are a coder) or pay someone to provide the fix.

[John Richardson]

Thanks. Will attempt.

[John Richardson]

Reported on Jira here: https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15737