CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi All,

Kudos to everyone who did the great work on the improved soft credit functionality.  I wanted to check in and see whether there was any reason that we're limiting soft credit blocks to 5 when creating contributions.

Mid-sized to large nonprofits often receive employer match donations that need to have soft credits distributed across 20-80 employee contact records.  I've patched softcredit.php to lift the 5 contact limit for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; is there any reason we shouldn't do the same in core?

I would like to second Max's suggestion that the limit to the number of soft credits be set at a higher number (either a very high number, or at least a reasonably high number (say 20)).

We have started using soft credits for the situation where a local group collects cash for memberships at a local group meeting and then sends us one cheque covering mulitple memberships.

This lets us enter the cheque against the group record and thus generate a bank deposit slip by running a report.

We have been doing this for about 6 months now and haven't yet hit the problem of cheque covering more than 5 memberships, but I am sure it will happen (we often get cheques covering 5 memberships). This means that the limit of 5 soft credits per contribution is sure to become an issue for us.

What is the rationale between only allowing 5 soft credits per contribution?  In at least some other places where traditionally there has been a lowish (10) limit to the number of  items that can be created (eg for price field options) the limit has been removed ( or perhaps set to a higher number).

The idea of making the number of allowed soft credits a setting is appealing I suppose, but it would seem to involve a lot of work for something that could be changed in a two(?) line PR.  (To do it properly one would need a CiviContribute Component Settings page similar to the CiviMember Component Settings page for setting the Default Online Membership Renewal Page).

If there is an unacceptable performance hit for some organisations if the number of soft credits is really high, then surely that should be addressed by organisation rules rather than by an arbitratily imposed limit in CiviCRM.

It is always a little dangerous to be too definite about anything when I have so little technical knowledge about CiviCRM. 

Although I still think no limit would be better if it can be done, now that I understand more about how the current form works I can see the reason for a configurable limit. (Sorry Lobo  )