How to Email Donation Receipts

Sumac can generate encrypted, government compliant electronic tax receipts that can be sent to donors. This can help reduce your organizational costs as you do not need to print and mail as many tax receipts.

To email donation receipts your administrator needs to configure Sumac to send email and you need email templates.

Test templates with a mail merge to make sure that everything works properly before using.

Once Sumac is configured and your template is ready to go you can generate your receipts. In your Donations list, search for the donations you want to create receipts for.

In this example we will process annual receipts. Select donations received last year with the receipt status “unreceipted”. Click Search.

Select all the donations in the list and expand Mailing. Click Make Receipts.

Choose which donations you want to create receipts for. In this example, we will select all types as we are running annual receipts.

Choose the template to be used for creating the receipt documents. If you have previously saved an email receipt template into your database and assigned it to a set, you can select the set that holds your email receipt template. Alternatively, you could opt not to use a set and select the template saved to your computer.

For more information on uploading your receipt templates to the database and assigning them to a set, please review the following articles: How to Upload Templates into Sumac and How to Use a Set of Templates).

Sumac presents the mail merge output options:

Since we’re using a PDF template Sumac realizes that we’ll need to save multiple files for emailing these receipts.

Although you can choose not to encrypt the output document, because these are receipts that should be un-editable, select the encryption option.

Sumac also asks you to choose a folder to hold the merged documents. It is recommended to have a designated email tax receipts folder. If you have not already created a folder for receipts, you can create a new folder.

You also have the option to save a communication record to indicate that you made receipts for these contacts. Since we still have to email the receipts to the donors, click No. We can save the communication records when we actually email the receipts.

You also have the option to mark each donation receipted as Acknowledged, if acknowledgements are used at your organization. If it's not applicable, click No.

Click OK to generate the receipts.

Once the receipts have been generated and saved, a message will come up showing how many receipts were generated.

Next, click Email Receipts under Mailing.

Sumac asks you to choose the folder that holds the receipts you want to email. Select the appropriate folder and click Choose.

Sumac shows you a list of all the receipts in that folder, along with the appropriate donor contact for each receipt, and the donor’s email address.

If you have donors who prefer print receipts, create a communication type “Prefers Print Receipts” using Field Values. You can then exclude this group by clicking Filter & Select.

Click Start Bulk Email, and Sumac asks you to confirm that you want to send the receipts to these contacts. Click Yes.

At this point, the process is the same as sending any email through Sumac. Choose the office to send the email from and provide a subject line. Select an html template for the body of the email, or quick compose some information into the email.

If you have created a thank you letter template to use when emailing donation receipts, you can choose that template for this email. You can either choose the template from your machine or the Sumac database if you uploaded the html template to the database previously. The body of this email should indicate that you are emailing the recipient a tax receipt, which is included as an attachment to this email.

Sumac automatically attaches the appropriate PDF receipt to each contact’s email.

Click Send, and Sumac asks if you want to save a communication record for the contacts you're emailing. Since we're sending a thank you letter as well as a receipt, it's a good idea to take advantage of this feature.

Sumac will prompt you to choose a location to save the status report for this email, which tells you whether each email sent successfully, and if not, why it failed.

When the emails are sending, a progress window opens in the bottom right corner of the screen. You can continue to use Sumac while the email is being sent.

Do not close this window as it causes the sending of emails to stop immediately.

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