CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

i'm not sure i'd consider it an error. when you "finish" the pay later transaction the linking record is created by the completing process

its 6 of one, half a dozen of the other kinda deal

lobo

NB - I presume the absence of this record is the reason why for 'pending pay later' I can receipt the contribution in from the event registration record but I can't for 'pending (incomplete transaction)' (this is where we get data entry errors happening although the new Xero integration should stop that.

There has been quite a bit of discussion around this general area and the consensus is that in future (3.2 from discussions) all payments will be recorded in a payments (the financial_trxns) table so in this case a contribution record would mean exactly what you say:

almost like recording their intention to pay but failed

I agree you should be able to change the status from pending (incomplete) to pending (pay later) as this would be a likely outcome of an administrator's follow up.

We track pending contributions for events rather than pending registrations. The reason being that if you want to cancel or confirm an event the most reliable way to do it is to cancel or confirm the contribution. You can also change the contribution amount (but not the participant payment amount) at that point - which is quite a common occurance. I know behaviour has changed a bit across versions but we used to find that events were confirmed or cancelled but contributions weren't before we started working off the contributions page.

Thus we direct our administrator to work off that screen. But OCCASSIONALLY there is a pending registration with no pending contribution record to track. We also occassionally find the administrator deletes a contribution (where it was a mistake and there are multiples) but the participation record is not deleted. I could prevent them from making deletions but really the main problem is that if you try to complete a pending registration a new one is created. I did start looking at how to fix (patch) this as the code is 95% there & hope to get back to it.