CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is there a way to manually enter recurring donations?

The reason I ask is that sometimes people or organizations send us their credit card information and ask us to set up their recurring donation for them.  I can't figure out how to do this in civi.   When we set up the donations manually in paypal (our payment processor) the recurring gifts don't show up for the user in civi.  We then have to batch process these into civi as standard donations.

On the other hand, if a user sets up a recurring payment herself through a civicontribute online donation page the recurring contribution shows up in the constituent record each month.

Any thoughts?

This is a bit confusing.  The way to do it is simple but not obvious:

1. Search for the contact and go to the contact's summary page.

2. Click the 'contributions' tab

3. Choose option (button) "Submit Credit Card Contribution"

Now you will have the option to record a credit card payment for which a recurring period can be set.

This is confusing simply because allowing backoffice staff have a wide number of different ways to enter transactions--the 'contribution' menu, clicking on the 'action' button on the contact summary page, or going to the contact's 'contribution' tab and clicking 'record contribution'.

However, none of those allow the processing of a live credit card OR the creation of a recurring contribution.

Only the "Submit Credit Card Contribution" option allows the creation of contributions with recurring credit card charges.

You can submit recurring membership payments using the membership tab and then the 'submit credit card membership' button as well--but if you want to do that there is some setup required first--you must set up a membership level that allows auto-renewing memberships.

Also, all of this is dependent on having a payment processor set up in CiviCRM that allows recurring payments. If you try this and don't see the recurring payment options appear, your payment processor might not have the capability.