CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have just completed importing historical data for past events, and now have participant records going back a couple years including event fees.  The trouble is that none of these records show the event fee as having been paid, which means they are not included in contribution reports.

Is there a way to mark them all as paid?  I tried to accomplish this with bulk update via profile, but you can't put participant and contribution fields into the same profile.  I also tried it with an export/import, but again there was no payment completed field available in the import mapping.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Hmm.  Looked into it a little bit, and I suspect this may be beyond my capability.

Importing contribution records is straightforward, but I am not sure linking them to participant records is feasible with my data set.  My historical data is all of people buying tickets to performances, and it is not uncommon for folks to attend multiple times.  As far as I can tell, the participant ID is the only way I have to uniquely identify each transaction.  Which suggests that I would have create the civicrm_contribution records and civicrm_participant_payment records simultaneously.

Given that this is historical data, it doesn't seem such a bad thing to leave the contribution and participant records unlinked (it is WAY to late for people to cancel, for instance).  But maybe there are other benefits to linking I'm not thinking of?  And because of the above, once the contribution records are created that's it, there is no further opportunity to link them in the future.

The other idea that I had was to use an export of participant records to create cvs files of both contribution and participant_payment records that are manually imported directly into the database.  Is there a reason this is a bad idea?