CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

If I have two separate contribution pages that use two different payment processors, is it possible to get CiviCRM to assign values for the contribution payment instrument that correspond to my payment processor used?

Based on my tests so far, I imagine this is not possible. It would be nice though, if I could assign a payment instrument to a payment processor when configuring the payment processor. Then all contributions that come in through pages with that payment processor could be associated with a more descriptive payment instrument like "PayPal", or "Authorize.net", or "IATS", or whatever.

Perhaps this is already possible somehow? I'm moving off of PayPal to another processor (probably IATS), and this functionality would definitely be helpful in my transition. For example I have many contribution pages and eventually I want to change the payment processor for all of them from PayPal to IATS. I need to be able to easily pull up all the contributions processed with a given payment processor for our accounting reconciliation purposes. So during/after this payment processor transition, I'm not quite sure how I'll get CiviCRM to export all of the PayPal transactions for the month separately from all the IATS transactions for the month. Any ideas?

Thanks Dave. This is interesting. We are currently making heavy use of the contribution type for something else -- it tells us which organizational/fundraising channel the contribution came from. So we have contributions types like "Direct mail", "Phone appeal", and other values that correspond to specific fundraising strategies that we have like "Bike-A-Thon", "Building Momentum Breakfast" which are all recurring events and campaigns that we organize periodically throughout our fundraising calendar. I suppose this information could go into a custom field. It's definitely important for us to utilize to answer questions like "how much did the 2012 Bike-A-Thon raise?".

Basically, right now for us, contribution type answers the question "why?" and contribution payment instrument answers the question "how?". These seem like two distinct concepts. Both of them are relevant to our accounting system because the "why" relates to our budgeting and the "how" relates to our reconciliation.

It would be tough for us to change the contribution type for our pages to correspond with the payment processor used because we'd loose the functionality that we're currently relying on for answering the "why" question. For example we have separate contribution pages for our direct mail and for our phone appeal. We point donors to one page in our mail solicitation and another page in our phone solicitation. This technique helps us to track the success of our fundraising strategies.

So I guess I don't expect an answer or solution to this issue at this point, but I'm just pointing these things out and I imagine they're relevant to other organizations too. Hopefully this feedback will be helpful as you continue to shape the data model and functionality.