A donation (DON-…) records one gift: the date, the donor (left blank, the gift is anonymous — recorded in full, credited to nobody), the designation, the account the money arrived in, the method — cash, bank transfer, cheque or online — and the amount. The gift is recorded in the currency it was given in: with multicurrency switched on, the form asks for that currency and the exchange rate of the day, and the rate is frozen on the donation — the books value the gift at that rate for ever, never at whatever today's rate happens to be. It follows the life of a document (§1.5) in its shortest form:
- Draft — recorded, not yet in the books. A draft that will never be posted can be voided, which keeps the record and marks it dead, rather than pretending it never existed.
- Post — the gift enters the accounts in one balanced entry: the receiving account is debited and the designation's income account is credited, and the posted donation carries the journal it created, so the gift and its posting are never separated. Posting needs the receiving account, a designation whose income account is set, and an open period — and refuses, naming the gap, when any is missing. The entry is always in your functional currency: the income stands at the gift's frozen rate. A foreign-currency gift with no rate on file cannot post — the refusal names the missing rate rather than inventing one. And where the money lands in an account held in another currency, what arrives there is converted at the bank's rate and the difference is booked as realised exchange gain or loss, exactly as receipts behave.
- Reverse — the correction for a posted gift (§1.6): a mirror entry unwinds the posting, and the donation stands as reversed, in the open, rather than edited away.
From the posted donation you print the donation receipt (§12.7) — the document the donor keeps.