CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Now that I think of it, it would be even cooler if the user could define the relationship (and direction) to "roll up".

We've never had a household request that their individual donation be listed separately (for example in event programs), but it could happen.  A new relationship of "credit donations to" would fix this problem.

Plus, one could easily report on aggregate donation made by employees of an org, even without using the "on behalf of" functionality.

Also, one could just as easily "roll down".  For instance to report on board giving in a way that includes spouses and households of board members.

Thanks for responding.

My need is definitely for a report.  We list all our donors in our playbills etc and currently the manual task of combining contributions into households for the list is an hours-long chore that must be repeated every time.

I probably didn't express myself well.  I don't want or need any custom fields.  I only thought that if combining contributions in a report is based on relationships, one could either use a standard relationship such as households OR create a relationship for just that purpose.  This second possibility is just more flexible if households or employers or parent/child doesn't meet one's use-case.  One could even have several reports based on different relationship criteria -- one for companies by cumulative employee donation, one for households, and one for a new "credit my donation to" relationship.

The issue I see with using permissioned relationships is that sometimes, quite rightly, these are reciprocal.  But for the purposes of generating a report one needs by definition to rollup/combine contributions in one direction only.  Also the permissioning encompasses all relationships and one might not necessarily want to combine contributions on every axis.

I had hoped that there were other folks who needed the same sort of thing, but it is starting to look like we'll need to get a custom report built for us from scratch.

Thanks again.

This is what I get for posting faster than I think.

My specific need is for a report that combines contributions by household.  But immediately after posting it occurred to me that as long as the logic was based on a relationship, it would be much more flexible to let it be based on any relationship.   That's all I was trying to say.  Doesn't matter what you call a relationship or what other purpose it may or may not serve, one could still run a report that aggregates contributions on that relationship.

Basically, I would like the logic to be:

If contact A has relationship X to contact B, then for the purpose of this report:
    1. Don't include A in the report
    2. Include A's contributions in B's aggregate total


The issues I have with soft credits are 1) it is really hard to enforce proper soft-crediting on every donation and event registration, 2) any soft credit data is 'permanent' in the sense that it is tied directly to the donation (consider the creation or dissolution of a household), and 3) there is still no report that merges soft-credits with hard-credits into one list based on who 'gets credit' for the contribution.

Thanks for the questions.  It is helpful to think this stuff through more clearly.



I am a little surprised that no one else has chimed in with a similar need.  We publish a very simple list of all our supporters in declining aggregate amount and grouped into 'supporter categories'  (e.g. 'friends', 'underwriters', 'patrons', super-stars', etc.)  When checks are mailed in, we are smart enough to log the contribution to a household, set the soft-credit, etc etc.  But trying to retroactively do that for every event registration, online donation, and so on would be even more work than it takes now to manually merge individual contributions into households.

All I'm looking for is a report that lists the right contacts in the right order.

I hate to bump this, but it seems like this is an enormous oversight in CiviCRM report functionality. Has anyone come up with a custom report solution for this? Being able to roll the donations up to the relationship makes the relationship functionality actually useful.