A contact is not a payment instruction
A contact row helps identify and communicate with a person. A historical donation row describes a recorded transaction. An active recurring instruction governs a future attempted gift. Treating these as interchangeable can leave a new administrator believing that an imported spreadsheet has restored an ongoing giving arrangement. 4aGoodCause documents separate contact and donation imports, and a separate subscription workflow. That distinction is the starting point—not evidence that every existing record is correct.
Name the record that can answer the question
Write the question before opening an export. For “Who should receive this correction?” inspect the organization’s authorized contact record. For “What was recorded last month?” inspect the relevant transaction evidence and its status. For “Will another gift be attempted?” inspect the active instruction with its provider and effective date. If a copied report cannot establish the current answer, label it historical rather than filling the gap with an assumption.
Use an evidence note, not another donor database
Our suggested note has five fields: the question, authoritative system, observation time, responsible role and unresolved issue. Keep the actual donor identifiers inside your organization’s approved system; this publication neither needs nor accepts them. When two systems disagree, preserve both observations with their dates. A later observation may explain a difference, but it does not make the earlier entry an error automatically. Ask the authorized owner to reconcile the specific discrepancy.
A fictional handover with three different counts
Imagine an outgoing administrator leaves 80 contacts, 65 historical gift rows and 24 currently active instructions. None of those counts should be forced to match: one donor can have multiple transactions and a contact may never have given. The useful handover says what each count includes, its cut-off time and which system produced it. Review imports next if the discrepancy began during a transfer; use the status worksheet only for a deliberately defined queue, not to compare unrelated totals.
Sources used for this page
These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.
- 4aGoodCause contact import — Merchant documentation · help.4agoodcause.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-30
- 4aGoodCause donation-history import — Merchant documentation · help.4agoodcause.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-30
- 4aGoodCause subscription changes — Merchant documentation · help.4agoodcause.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-30