CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We regularly import contributions in from a spreadsheet that includes transactions from the following sources ...

• online bank account statement
• credit card gateway statement
• direct debit provider statement (ie, they process direct debits on our behalf)
• deposit book (cheques and cash)

These sources include descriptions which we use to determine the identity of the contact making the contribution. We also apply some logic to determine whether the contribution is a pledge payment.

It would be good to put this logic into the import process of CiviCRM.

Has anyone done this?

If not, I think I will need to implement the following logic ...

• Create custom data that stores (multiple) bank-statement-descriptions for contacts
• Extend this to include patterns (some descriptions vary each time)
• During import, match on bank-statement-description
• For contacts with pledges, where possible apply the contribution as a pledge payment

Here are some problems we regularly have ...

• Can't tell from the description which contact made the contribution (not sure anything can be done about that!), so manual interevention is required
• Contribution amount doesn't match pledge amount (I think a fix is proposed to allow partial payments for pledges)
• If the contribution can't possibly match a pledge (eg, contribution type is different) it would be good for CiviCRM to accept the contribution as not being a pledge payment

Ken

If not, I think I will need to implement the following logic ...

• Create custom data that stores (multiple) bank-statement-descriptions for contacts
• Extend this to include patterns (some descriptions vary each time)
• During import, match on bank-statement-description
• For contacts with pledges, where possible apply the contribution as a pledge payment

Partial solution for this to play with and possibly use ...
- You could add a custom field for Individuals which holds the 'bank statement description'
- Add this to Strict dedupe rule for Individuals
- Then I think u can use this fields as the 'match to contact' field for contribution import

The drawback - you almost certainly ONLY want this rule in effect for contribution imports - and there's currently no way to control which dedupe rule is used for a particular import workflow. The desirable approach would be to add functionality that we've talked about for a while  - which is to allow user to select a specific dedupe ruleset for a given import (and probably an option save that selection to the import mapping).

You might be able to implement a hook to override the default strict dedupe rule and select your contribution specific one.