CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is there any way to get CiviContribute to hand out reference numbers to people that ask to pay later? That would make it much easier to find out which payment in the database corresponds to the cheque that just arrived in the post or bank transfer that just turned on the bank statement. At the moment, the only option seems to be to use email addresses or surnames as references.

Thanks!

still, it might be useful if the pay-later option behaved a little more like a payment processor.

I've seen this issue as well, and code that works with a payment processor can misbehave if it doesn't threat "pay later" as a special case.  And certainly, the end user _must_ treat pay later as a special case, since even more than credit card transactions, the users will need to track to make sure they actually get the checks.

The email work-around isn't bad (I've already done mods on the thank you email, and as you say, it isn't too hard to do), but I suspect that folks will see a strong need to be able to determine who's really paid, and who's only said they _will_ pay.