CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm setting up a new install. CiviCRM will be used to track contributions from this point on, but they have a list of people who have previously donated, but don't have the full breakdown of individual contributions.

Anyone in the community have experience of recording this to share?

As I see it there are the following options.

Use a special contribution.

I could set up a contribution type "Old", we could enter a nominal value £1 and use the same date for all these contribs. The benefits are that (1) users can easily search for donors old and new with a contribution search (2) viewing a record shows the contribution with all the others. (3) if the amount they had previously given was known, this could be stored. The drawbacks are (1) it's not recording what actually happened; the donor did not actually donate £1 on 1 Jan 2013. This could lead to confusion.

Use a group/tag: "Pre 2013 donor"

Feels weird use of group. Don't like tags for historical information as the taxonomy can become difficult to manage. Difficult to find "all donors" as have to do contribs search, separate group search, then combine the results.

Use a special activity

This is like the contribution one except it's kept separate from the contributions so does not suffer from polluting reports with untruths about specific contributions. But it makes searching difficult as with tags/groups.

Obviously it's easy to say it depends on my client's likely use, but I'm not sure they'll really know(!) So, have you encountered this sort of thing and what did/would you do?

Yep, I think that's how I'll do it. Thanks for contributing.